stacle. It is not so among us. There are countries, as is the case in Peru and Bolivia, where the savage tribe is incorporated in the society of Christians, with his tent instead of a house, with his language opposed to the spread of the sphere of knowledge, with his ordinary dress scarcely covering his original nakedness, and destitute of all the means which civilization has put into the hands of man for his improvement and well-being. In other countries, such as Chili and the Argentine Republic, the savage, the original inhabitant of these territories, by the labors of three centuries has been domesticated, detached from the tribe, and mingling with the society of European origin, has acquired their language, their customs, and the first rudiments of culture; but in exchange, he has transmitted to our masses many of his defects, much of his old character, and many of his customs. From the American Indians we have derived the rancho, without doors, without furniture, uncleanly, without division into apartments, and of necessity without decorum or dignity in the family, who are huddled together in confused mixture within a contracted space, where they eat, sleep, live, work, and satisfy all their wants. From the old savage come the propensity to steal and to cheat, which appears innate in our lower classes, and the cruel appetites which barbarism had developed.

The

That piece of cloth which covers the untidiness of the dress and creates a partition wall between educated society and the populace -the poncho-is of savage origin. There is no poncho in the United States, and all men are equal, because the European dresscivilized, cleanly, Christian, in fact-is common to all classes. chiripá is again another piece of cloth which the savages have taught the Christian to wear, thus debasing him to their own condition and exterior appearance, instead of themselves adopting our customs. I have seen a division of savage Indians, highway robbers, in the province of Santa Fé, formed by the side of divisions. of Christian cavalry, and by nothing even in the dress of the riders, or in the trappings of the horses, could I at first sight distinguish those who were of European origin from those who came from the forest.

These remnants of barbarism, these semi-savage appearances, produce social and industrial results which are fatal to society in general and embarrass or are even destructive to progress, substituting sometimes in the government and administration of public affairs the native violence for civilized right, savage cruelty for Christian humanity, robbery and pillage on the highway for the guarantees of property. The immobility of our working classes proceeds from the same origin; their almost repugnance to the en

joyments and conveniences of civilized life, their regardlessness of acquisition, their want of aspiration for a better condition, their rosistance to the adoption of better modes of labor, and better and fuller dress. To that cause, also, may be traced the indifference with which educated society sees these relicts of a rude past perpetuated, inadequate to our present situation, pregnant with danger to the future in some places, fruitful in terrible lessons in others, unproductive of wealth and well-being every where, and a permanent obstacle to the increase and prosperity of the nation which honors with the name of citizens these stationary beings, rebels to culture, without aptitude for intelligent labor, and without discipline for the political life which our institutions impose upon us.

The schoolmaster, cast in the midst of our country population, will for a long time be there like the guard of a telegraph, with his arms crossed in the midst of the desert. His mission is to carry to the extremities the intellectual life which moves in the center. His task is to sow every year in ungrateful soil, in danger of seeing the seed trampled under the horses' feet, with the hope that a grain or two, fallen in a sheltered place, may spring up. The child, educated with so much care, will return to the bosom of the family and to the rancho, where the uncleanliness, the disdainful indifference of the father, and the rudeness of the mother, will entirely destroy or will at least weaken the impressions that have been made. The very atmosphere in which he lives, the costumes he sees, the backwardness which surrounds him, the very aspect of objects, of the house, of the plough, the manner of reaping, the social relations, all will conspire to weaken the germ of better ideas which he receives at school. The indifference of the authorities, the want of encouragement, the indifference of the parents, will carry to the very school monotony and disenchantment.

But let us begin the work and follow its progress step by step. One hundred children are gathered under the direction of a schoolmaster. The simple fact of each one's leaving the narrow circle of the family and breaking from the influence of the ordinary routine of life, and of their reunion in groups under a recognized authority, implants in the mind the first ideas and consequent laws of associa tion; it becomes necessary to obey, to act, not as hitherto in conformity to the inspiration of individual caprice, but in virtue of something like duty, according to a controlling method, under an authority like a government, for an end beyond the present time. Here you already have morality inculcated, rude nature subjected, a mos moris, a discipline of habit. There begins to be custom, a

daily habit of work, of directing action to an end. It is said of mathematics that they discipline the reason; the schools, simply for their requiring attendance at fixed hours and with a determined object, become a means of discipline to the passions in the germ and in their unfolding. The children can not shout here when they please, nor laugh, nor run, nor fight, nor eat. Such social life leaves its traces upon the mind and upon the future customs of him who is to be a man. The statistics of every country have proved this fact without its being recognized. To know how to read even badly, without having made use of reading as a means of instruc tion, has been found to be a preservative against crime, the number of crimes among this class of men being relatively less than among the mass, who are altogether destitute of the first rudiments of knowledge. What influence could this sterile beginning of instruction have on the morality of the individual? None! It is the school. Reading is usually only learned in school, and it is the school that brings the appetites under control, educates the mind, subordinates the passions, and domesticates the man. The school brings into contact men in the germ, and compels them to associate day after day without anger. The instinct of a boy leads him to seek a quarrel with another boy of his own age and strength whom he meets in the street; but the daily habit of seeing one hundred boys in the school under the same conditions, takes away this hostile feeling, and the quarrelsome spirit of the natural man, which at a later day would be translated into stabbing and homicide, is suffocated or softened at its source. On the other hand, the soul makes use of material organs for its functions, and is enabled by practice to strengthen and perfect itself. The weak yearling is converted into the strong and powerful ox by means of the exercise of its muscles. The memory, the judgment, and the power of perceiving analogies and contrasts, become refined and expand with the smallest exercise of the mind. Learning to read, solely as an exercise of the mental faculties, without its application to the ends of reading, causes a revolution in the mind of the child, improves him, expands him. Hundreds of men have begun a study and spontaneously abandoned it, and lost what they had learned; have gone through a course of studies and afterwards forgotten all or nearly all that they had read; or have studied Latin alone, and that badly, (and for the purposes of life, for the acquirement of any other than professional knowledge, an acquaintance with Latin is like knowing the Guichua dialect for the purposes of commerce,) and nevertheless it is an established fact that these men who have abandoned study, these Latin students, have a clearer mind than those who have

sons and to engage a properly trained native born teacher—with the limitation soon afterwards made that where Catholic schools already existed the establishment of new schools was unnecessary. Wherever a synagogue existed, also, a Jewish school was permitted and afterwards required, and the right was granted of admission to the normal schools. In other cases the children were obliged to attend the Catholic schools, relieved only from the prayers and religious instruction, and to avoid occasion of disturbance and ill-will, separate benches were to be set apart for their use. The interest taken by the Jews of Bohemia in the improvement of schools was acknowledged by the Emperor by appropriating certain taxes levied upon them to their educational benefit.

The energetic efforts of the Emperor, aided by the zealous coöperation of Gall, Kindermann, Mehoffer, and others, soon effected an extraordinary increase in the number and attendance of the schools. In Bohemia within ten years the number of scholars had quadrupled, and in Moravia and Silesia it had increased tenfold. But the instruction was still far from satisfactory. Gall had, indeed, improved to some extent the methods of Felbiger, and modified them by his own so-called Socratic system; but the far better systems that had recently arisen among the German pedagogists were wholly unknown; he had altered the textbooks, and done away with many of the monotonous simultaneous exercises, yet the instruction of the schools still remained too uniform and mechanical, owing to the iron strictness of the rules by which it was governed. No methods of teaching were permitted but those taught in the normal schools, the text-books, even to the style of penmanship, and the order of lessons were rigidly prescribed. The regulation that required the use of the German language in the city schools and wherever possible elsewhere, was also found of very difficult execution, causing the common schools to be generally known as "German schools," and giving rise to much of the aversion to Germanism that prevailed among the Slavonians, though in fact no race shows so little capacity of resistance in its intercourse with other races, coalesces with them so easily, and is therefore so far from seeking their denationalization as the German.

It was required with equal stringency that no teacher should be employed without a previous examination, and on the part of candidates for the pastoral office a year of special instruction was necessary in pastoral divinity, pedagogics, catechetics, methods, and rural economy, and no pupil could be admitted to the novitiate of an order without a normal school certificate. Singing in the common schools was to be made the subject of especial care, and instruction in industrial occupations was urgently recommended. Bohemia took the lead in this direction, under Kindermann's influence, and the raising of silk, horticulture and orcharding, and the rearing of bees received much attention. Efforts were continued to remove corporal punishment entirely from the schools, and Spendou, who succeeded Gall in 1789, devoted himself especially to this

We want, however, the school-house, the spacious, commodious, and well-ventilated building. What structure is that to be seen yonder with white and raised front and elegant outline? It is the town school-house, under the roof of which the present generation has spent three or four years. When this generation shall have become full men and women, the rancho will have disappeared, one by one, and the cheerful fireside will shine instead. The most pleasant recollections of our infancy are associated with this pretty and spacious building, with the cheerful and comfortable fireplace. How can such associations be broken?

But where is the book that shall be used after the child has learned to read, the book to lead him through life? This book will not be long in coming. Agriculture needs books; the art of war needs books; cattle-raising requires books; the school requires books; and our religion needs books, that we may not depend on oral tradition alone for the preservation of our faith. Let us teach reading in all its branches and under all possible forms, to make it fruitful;-geography, arithmetic, linear drawing, for all are but reading, or a form of reading—and in this way we may change the whole face and future of our country, and substitute, instead of the Promancanian Spanish and Araucanian Indian, unfitted for progress, a people able to follow all modern industrial pursuits on its onward rapid march. The steamers, beating the waters of our rivers and coasts, are a foreign production; the stuffs in which we are clothed are no work of ours; the railroad, advancing to the very foot of our Cordilleras, is not the product of our brains. The auxiliary agencies adopted for the propagation of common schools are accusing our impotency and nothingness, because they are all foreign importations. These are but the simple overflowing of the overfull channels of other lands, that begins to invade slowly our own homes, our streets, and fields. Let us then teach reading, so that our people may read the wonders of the railroad, of the telegraph, and of those steamers that are proclaiming, like Nature itself, the glory of God. Like God's creation, those marvelous inventions of men go on proclaiming, throughout the world, the power and glory of those nations who have been elevated above the rest by mental culture, and by endowing their children with the means of enjoying the benefit of the accumulated knowledge and experience of mankind.

Such is the schoolmaster's work. An humble but lofty taskhumble enough not to be forgotten by those who perform so beneficent ministryship. They are the unpretending instrument of wondrous transformations!