away from the great centers of social and cultivated life, where the wealthy and influential people schooled their children elsewhere and the "lower orders" drifted on, as in all communities of similar type. The population of the city must have been far less stable than now, and the contentions of national politics during those exciting years, including the second war with England and the nullification movement of 1832, were doubtless a great hindrance. It was only by degrees that the press of the city came to pay any respect to the schools. In fact, a scheme of "pauper education," altogether including less than 1,000 children, with no fit place of abode, with schoolhouses, books, and apparatus of the lowest order, would hardly attract attention outside its own poor environment.

But the time was favorable to a forward movement. Mayor Seaton had the good sense to understand that only by a challenge of the town to rise up and establish the American system of universal education at public cost could there be a reasonable hope of success. The fact that as soon as this plan of the mayor was plainly stated the city responded, and in 1844-45 put on the ground a system of common schools corresponding to that of the chief Northern States, would seem to prove that it was not due so much to the indifference of the people to education as to the lack of competent leadership that Washington had so long remained in the rear rank of American cities in this respect.

In the city council Mr. J. F. Halliday brought forward a plan for a system of seven public schools, to accommodate 3,000 pupils, and a tax of one-sixth of 1 per cent on all the assessable property of the city. This precipitated a sharp discussion in which the poverty of the present arrangement, where 200 children were placed in surroundings rather indicating "a place of punishment for offenders than a school for instruction," was made evident. John Quincy Adams, Caleb Cushing, Justice Woodbury, and other eminent residents of Washington added their powerful influence The result was the passage of the school law of 1814, by which a board of twelve trustees, three from each of the four wards, was chosen by the city council, and $3,612 was appropriated for erecting schoolhouses and renting rooms. From this date the public schools of Washington had a real existence. In the four years following this action more than $5,000 a year was appropriated. In 1818 a tax of $1 a year was laid on every white male citizen for education, and the board of trustees was assigned a place of meeting in the city hall.

One of the most interesting chapters in the educational history of the national capital is the records of the efforts of the free colored people for the instruction of their children previous to 1860. In the nineteenth volume of Barnard's American Journal of Education will be found an elaborate treatise in which the details of this wonderful story are set forth in a way so complete as to obviate the necessity of their repetition. Of course all this was in the line of private and Sunday-school work, the Sunday school at one time bearing the same relation to the elementary education of these people as at an earlier period in England. But so persistent was this movement and so thoroughly did it impress itself on the mass of superior colored people that it laid the foundation of the remarkable public-school movement in 1862 which has resulted in the development of the most elaborate and successful system of common schools for this people in Washington known in the country.

In the year 1807, two years after the earliest movement for schooling the white people of the city, three men, Bell, Franklin, and Liverpool, established the first school for free negroes in the city of Washington. There were then but 5,000 white people in the city, 1,000 slaves, and 500 free negroes. When we consider the difficulties through which the first public school in Washington for white children struggled year after year through a sickly life with 5,000 people of the "superior race" behind it, we can appreciate the courage of these three men, all mechanics and just emancipated from slavery, in the establishment of their own school, representing but 500 people, with no hope of public aid. Neither of these men could read or write. Bell was the leader in the noble enterprise. His freedom was purchased by

his enslaved wife for $400, earned by market gardening, and he returned the favor by purchasing her freedom out of the first earnings of his free labor. The teacher of the school was a Mr. Lowe, a white man, and it was continued for several years. About the same time a Mrs. Alethia Tanner, afterwards the housemaid of Thomas Jefferson, began a remarkable career of purchasing, first, her own freedom, and then that of 21 relatives and friends, including the Cook family, which has been identified with the education of their people from the first. In 1818 an association of colored folk, under the name the Resolute Beneficial Society, established a school which first under the instruction of a relative of Rev. John Pierpont and afterwards of John Adams, the first colored teacher in the District, did good service. From that day until the breaking out of the civil war, in Washington and Georgetown, and in Alexandria, until its retrocession to Virginia, in 1846, a series of schools for these people were established, each with some characteristic of special interest. Several of the most successful teachers were from England and Scotland, and a good number of Southern white people of recognized social standing. At one time there was a habit of educating colored children in the private schools for whites, and even slaves were permitted to receive instruction. The Sunday schools of the leading churches had also a colored department.

But all this came to an end in 1832-1834, when, as the result of the Nat Turner slave insurrection in Virginia, the public mind in the South was wrought to a high pitch of excitement. The schools of these people in Washington were largely broken up by mobs, the colored churches assailed, and several of the leading teachers obliged to flee the town. But nothing could suppress the determination of such as remained, and in due time the schools came up, every year better than before. The constituency was not large, the free negroes of the District up to 1810 not numbering more than 6,000. A careful study of the records of these numerous private colored schools will show that a good proportion of the 1,000 children of school age must have been under instruction. The Catholic Church was not behind in this movement. There was one important school in Georgetown and another under the management of the Sisters of Providence, an order of colored women devoted to the education of their race, is still an important seminary for girls. The school of Rev. John F. Cook, teacher and clergyman, was the beginning of the valuable educational labors of this family, one of whom is the excellent superintendent of the colored schools of the city of Washington.

In this movement the colored people were supported by the sympathy and encouraged by the aid of many leading people of the District. Thomas Jefferson did not hesitate to publish his belief that the African race is capable of education and should be admitted to all opportunities of good schooling. In a letter to Benjamin Banneker, a remarkable colored man of Maryland, the son of native African parents, who, by self-education, became noted as an author, mathematician, and mechanician, a publisher of an almanac, known to the learned societies of Paris and London, Mr. Jefferson wrote: Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing only to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America." Jefferson sent the almanac of Banneker to the Academy of Sciences at Paris as a “justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them;" and it was quoted by Pitt, Fox, and Wilberforce in the British Parliament as an argument in behalf of the emancipation and education of the negro race.

Out of this notable and most praiseworthy effort of the superior free colored people to educate their children it has come to pass that in no part of the country is there so fine a group of educated and worthy families of this race as in Washington. At the critical period of the civil war, when thousands of emancipated slaves were thrown upon the city, these people came to the front and have been largely influential in the organization and highly successful management of their department of

the public school system, in which 12,000 children are now educated not only in elementary schools, but with excellent high, normal, industrial, and artistic training, their teachers being paid the same salaries as those of the white race, with schoolhouses of the most approved pattern. Half the expenses of the public schools of the District of Columbia are now paid by the Congress of the United States, which also makes a generous yearly grant of money to Howard University, one of the earliest and best known institutions for the higher and professional education of this people in the country.

CONCLUSION.

The close of the first half century of the Republic may be regarded as the limit of the period included in this essay. At this decade, 1830-1840, the idea of the original New England system of public instruction, the organization, support, and supervision of a scheme of education by the people, acting through the ordinary agencies of local, colonial, and State government, had finally been adopted by every Commonwealth in the New England, Central, and Northwestern States; and although none of the slaveholding States had fully accepted the system, all were either partially committed to it, or the educational public in each of them-a steadily increasing factor in their educational affairs-was working along the same line, gathering the elements for the prodigious effort for the establishment of the American common school as soon as the chief hindrance to universal education-the institution of slavery-should be removed. Before 1840 every American State had either adopted, or its educational public was working toward, the ideal of a common system of instruction and discipline, under the direction of the State, for the training of the children and youth into good American citizenship.

If this story of the origin of the American common school has been fitly told, it will be seen that its one original, characteristic, and essential idea is only the application of the American idea of government and society to education. The American common school is only the American people keeping school. It is their will and pleasure expressed through the agency of a flexible majority. This is the radical note of difference between the American and any other type of national education in any previous age or in any European nation at the present time. And because this is its only essential characteristic the American common school has this conspicious advantage over all other systems: It becomes, in its development, the recipient of the highest thinking, aspiration, and living of a great nationality composed of the most powerful and progressive clements of all civilized peoples, working under the boundless encouragements and opportunities of a new world toward the realization of the broadest and most practical ideal of freedom consistent with a safe and conservative order of society.

It is not therefore essential that the American common school should be free in the sense of instruction without direct cost to the pupil, although, since under all conditions the indirect expense of schooling bears more heavily on the family than the public, it is good policy to make the public school free to all. Neither is the system chained to any despotic or essential method of organization, discipline, and instruction. It "lives and moves and has its being" in the expanding educational consciousness of the whole people. Thus, it may with perfect consistency adopt much that is excellent in the systems of other peoples, avail itself of the fruits of the largest educational experience everywhere, and make its own the most admirablo results of the wisest thought and noblest achievement in all countries and all time. So that, "without variablenesss or shadow of turning," it abides by its own ide:l that this is the people's school. It violates no radical American principle and vindi cates its right to "claim the earth" in behalf of the children of the Republic.

In the rude and tentative beginnings of the American common school, as in th earliest motions of the colonial life, which was feeling after the beginnings of repul lican institutions, we have seen that misapprehensions and mistakes were inevitable. Hence, no State may claim exemption from criticism and none should resent a corret

and fair statement of its early educational history. For no Commonwealth has failed to contribute some valuable element of thought in its foremost educators and rich experience from its various experiments in school-keeping toward the present condition of educational affairs. In each the educational public appeared in due season and became an inevitable and vital feature in the life of the State, wrought in its own way, and finally triumphed. And the most significant fact is that this victory was often achieved in a style inexplicable to the educational pedant, in the face and eyes of the schemes and predictions of the great educational theorist, in a way that can only be appreciated by him who believes in the American idea of the gradual development of the whole people under the direction of a gracious Divine Providence.

The opening decade of the second half century of the Republic became memorable as the period of the great American revival of universal education. Under this great uplift of public sentiment, through the direction of the most notable group of educational leaders that had appeared in the country, the local district elementary school of the old time evolved into the graded common school of the later years; was immensely extended and enriched in all its departments; was especially improved in its methods of instruction and discipline, chiefly through native genius and experience, gradually by the careful adjustment of the best European methods to home use, and largely under the pronounced influence of the State normal schools, and most important of all is the fact that this was a veritable people's revival, in which the intelligent and patriotic masses in every State were aroused, educated, and confirmed in the conviction of their imperative right and duty to provide the best for the children.

One may see how this fruitful period of reform in education found its grand culmination in the generation that followed the close of the great civil war. Then, first, under the inspiration of a renewed and reconstructed nationality, the American common school had free course, ran, and was glorified through the entire area of the Republic. And very significant is the fact that the older States, in which the conflict for universal education had been most involved and prolonged, now came to the front in the most decisive way and in some respects surpassed all the original States. And the South, that so long remained outside the expanding circle of the common school, has responded to the ery of the children during the past twenty years by the most remarkable achievement in the organization and support of popular education recorded in history.

To the careful reader of this "great and wondrous story," who is in full accord with the American idea, there can be no conclusion possible save a profound confidence in the American gospel of universal education, and an abiding faith that under a wise and gracious Providence the American people is now summoned to the apostleship of this gospel in a career only now well begun.

[NOTE.-The fact that the constitution of the State of Delaware in 1792 contained the provision for education, afterwards adopted in the revised constitution in 1831, directing the legislature "to provide by law for the establishment of schools and promoting arts and sciences," was inadvertently omitted; also, on page 276 the name Lyon should be spelled Ligon.-A. D. M.]

CHAPTER VIII.

PUBLIC, SOCIETY, AND SCHOOL LIBRARIES.1

References to preceding reports of the United States Bureau of Education, in which this subject has been treated: In annual reports, 1870, pp. 541, 542; 1871, pp. 668– 677; 1872, pp. liii-lvii, 820-S87; 1873, pp. lxxxviii-xciv, 729-763; 1874, pp. lxxxviixcii, 753-793; 1875, pp. civ-cvii, 797–883; 1876, pp. cxxiii-cxxv, 777-779; 1877, pp. cxxxi-cxlii, 583–585; 1878, pp. cxxi1, 599-600; 1879, pp. clvii-clviii, 618-619; 1880, pp. clxvi-clxvii, 738-741; 1881, pp. cci-cciv, 668-671; 1882-83, pp. clxxxv-clxxxviii, 694-699; 1883-84, pp. clxxxiii-clxxxiv, 724-737; 1884-85, pp. cexxix-cexxx, 691– 782; 1885-86, pp. 716-719; 1886-87, pp. 901-972; 1887-88, pp. 1031-1039; 1892-93, pp. 575-583, 691-1014; 1893-94, pp. 1503-1504; 1895-96, pp. 339-599. See also in each report statistics of libraries of schools and colleges. Refer also to index in cach annual report from 1888-89 to 1895-96 for libraries in foreign countries. In special reports and circulars of information; 1876, Public Libraries in the United States of America, their history, condition, and management, Part I, edited by S. R. Warren and S. N. Clark, pp. xxxv, 1187; Rules for a printed Dictionary Catalogue, Part II, by C. A. Cutter, pp. 89; Circular of Information No. 1, 1880, College Libraries as Aids to Instruction, by Justin Winsor and Otis II. Robinson, pp. 27; Circular of Information No. 1, 1881, Construction of Library Buildings, by William Poole, pp. 26; 1881, Library Aids, by Samuel Green, pp. 10; 1886, Statistics of Public Libraries in the United States, pp. 98, reprinted from 1884-85 annual report; 1886, Special Report, New Orleans Exposition 1884–85, pp. 650-655; 1891, Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue, by Charles A. Cutter, pp. 140; third edition, with corrections and additions, reprinted from the 1876 special report; Circular of Information No. 7, 1893, Statistics of Public Libraries in the United States and Canada (in 1891), by Weston Flint, pp. 213; 1893, Catalogue of A. L. A. Library, 5,000 volumes, for a popular library, pp. 592; 1896, Papers prepared for the World's Library Congress, held at the Columbian Exposition, edited by Melvil Dewey, pp. 691-1014, reprinted from annual report 1892-93.

The public library is recognized as one of the great forces in modern educational progress. For nearly thirty years the United States Bureau of Education has constantly emphasized the importance of these institutions as aids to instruction. In every annual report from 1867-68 to the present year has appeared information relating to college and school libraries, and periodically the Bureau has published detailed statistics of public libraries. The annual report for 1870 contained a list of 161 principal libraries not including college libraries. The report for 1872 contained a list of 1,080 libraries of 1,000 or more volumes. A special effort was made in 1875 to obtain a list of all the libraries in the United States having 300 volumes and over. The list as printed in the report for that year included 3,648 libraries, and of these, 2,039 had 1,000 or more volumes. This list was also published in the great special report issued by this office in 1876. That report was a volume of about 1,200 pages devoted to "Public Libraries in the United States of America, their

By Alex Summers, Statistician of the Bureau.