[§ 552 public schools were much inferior to the private schools. In New York and Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Lancaster County), all public schools were pauper schools cheap private enterprises for poor children only, supported by appropriations from the county boards.

The labor unions protested indignantly against the pauper school, and against any "class" school. They called for a "general and equal education. . . immediately under the control and suffrage of the people," not "as charity... but as of right," "for every child in the State, from the lowest branch of the infant school to the lecture rooms of practical science."1 They anticipated also the modern demands for the kindergarten and for industrial training.

Toward this call for free schools for the people, the capitalistic press adopted a tone of condescending reproof. It reminded the workers that more education was already attainable by the poor in America than anywhere else. Much more could never be expected. "The peasant must labor during those hours of the day which his wealthy neighbor can give to abstract culture: otherwise the earth would not yield enough for the subsistence of all." And again, "Education . . . must be the work of individuals. ... If a government concern, nothing could prevent it from becoming a political job." Many leading papers reviled the idea of free public schools as "Agrarianism" or “an arbitrary division of property." And one editor deplores the taking away from "the more thriving members" of the working classes "one of their chief incitements to industry,the hope of earning the means of educating their children." Indeed, it is hard to find any of the hoary arguments, still furbished anew against every democratic proposal, which was not worn threadbare in the thirties in opposition to a freeschool system.

1 These quoted phrases are all taken from two of many reports on this matter adopted by the Mechanics' Union of Philadelphia. They are typical. More detail is given in West's American History and Government.

§ 552]

THE FIGHT FOR FREE SCHOOLS

465

FOR FURTHER READING. A somewhat fuller account of the Industrial Revolution in England is given in the Modern World, §§ 661-680. Material for the industrial conditions in America was not accessible in any suitable degree until the recent appearance of the Documentary History of American Industrial Society (§ 540, note, above). The older standard histories are therefore all lacking in this matter. Some valuable matter is scattered through the pages of Dodd's Expansion and Conflict, especially pp. 39-51, and a forceful sketch of the movement is given in Simons' Social Forces in American History, 179-190.

MODERN PLOWING TO SUGGEST A CONTRAST WITH THE FARM LIFE

INDICATED BY THE ILLUSTRATION ON PAGE 361.

CHAPTER XLIX

INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

553. THROUGHOUT the East, we have noted, elementary public schools were lacking or poor. Their revival was owing first of all to the persistent demand by the workingmen. That agitation prepared the ground for the work of humanitarian reformers led by Horace Mann. Through Mann's efforts, Massachusetts created a State Board of Education in 1837 and established the first American Normal School in 1839. By such forces, a good system of "common schools" soon spread over the Eastern States.

554. Meantime the Northwest, where all men were workingmen, was setting up, on paper at least, a complete system of free public education, such as the workingmen of the East were vainly asking for. In the West, elementary schools drew some help from the national land grant in the Survey Ordinance (§ 314), and State "universities" were founded early to save the national grant for "higher institutions of learning" (§ 315). It was natural therefore for the West to try to link primary school and university by public "high-schools," so as to form a complete State system. The constitution of Indiana in 1816 declared it the duty of the legislature to establish "a general system of education, ascending in regular graduation from township schools to a State University, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all."

In practice, however, private academies made the chief link between elementary schools and college for two generations more. Even the primary schools were often more imposing on paper than in fact; and in many States the land grants were wasted or stolen by incompetent or venal politicians. Still, by 1840, public schools were frequent enough in the Northwest,

§ 556]

VICTORY FOR FREE SCHOOLS

467 as in the Northeast, so that a poor boy with ambition and selfdenial could usually get at least "a common school education." 555. "Higher education" made even more progress than did the common schools. The Western "universities" were paper universities for some time more; but the "small college" multiplied in numbers and grew toward high standards and enlarged usefulness, especially in the Northeast. Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Hobart, Williams, in that section, had multitudes of ambitious imitators in the Southern and Northwestern States. Every Southern planter sent his sons to college, as a matter of course, - very often to the larger Northern institutions. In proportion to the White population, therefore, the South had more youth in college, down to the Civil War, than any other section.

In 1830 Oberlin, in Ohio, opened its doors to women. No other institution of equal rank did so for twenty years more; but special "seminaries" for girls soon appeared in large numbers.

556. The first real flowering in American literature came just after 1830. America's only earlier distinction in letters had been in political oratory. In this field, from 1812 to 1830, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun sustained the best traditions of the Revolutionary days; and those same years saw also the early work of Irving, Cooper, Simms, and Bryant. These long continued to grow in fame. And now between 1830 and 1845, began the public career of Edward Everett in oratory; of Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, and Whittier in the literature of creative imagination; of Bancroft, Prescott, Palfrey, and Sparks in historical composition; of Kent and Story in legal commentary; of Audubon, Agassiz, Dana, Asa Gray, and Maury ("the pathfinder of the seas") in science. Webster's Dictionary was published in 1828; ten years later, the Smithsonian Institution was founded; and, midway between, appeared the first penny daily, the New York Sun.

New England may claim the chief glory for this splendid outburst; but all the older sections had their share, and it found as eager appreciation in the new North

west as in New England itself. The Southern aristocracy had little sympathy with "Yankee" literature, tinged as most of it was with anti-slavery sentiment, but clung conservatively to the old English classics and to such moderns as Scott.

557. The intellectual ferment of the thirties and forties transformed society. Exact and profound scholarship was still lacking; but an aspiration for knowledge, a hunger for culture, a splendid idealism, became characteristics of American life,— until "fattened out," for a time after 1875, by a gross material prosperity. During that long era, to welcome "high thinking" at the price of "plain living" was instinctive in an almost unbelievably large portion of the people.

Ambitious boys, barefoot and in threadworn coats, thronged the little colleges, not for four years of a good time, but with genuine passion to break into the fairy realm of knowledge; and their hard-earned dimes that did not have to go for plain food went for books. English authors of a new sort of geniusCarlyle, Browning, William Morris-as well as English scientists with new teachings, like Darwin and Huxley, reached appreciative audiences in America sooner than at home. Many an English book, afterward recognized as epoch-making, found its way into far Western villages, and into the hands of eager young men and women there who had never worn evening dress

1 In 1846 a boy of eighteen started for Knox College, at Galesburg, Illinois. By working as a farm hand (he harvested two weeks for a Virgil and a Latin Dictionary), and by teaching school for a few months (and "boarding round") at eight dollars a month, he had saved up ten dollars. He walked first to Chicago, the nearest town, for supplies; but the unaccustomed temptation of the display in a bookstore window lured him within, and most of his capital went for a few books, which would seem old-fashioned, indeed, to the boys of to-day. The remaining cash bought only a pair of shoes and an Indian-blanket coat (with great stripes about the bottom). To save the precious shoes, he then walked the two hundred miles from his home to Galesburg barefoot. His first day there, he built a fence for the President's cow pasture, to earn money for textbooks, and found a place to work for his board through the college year. This man became one of the notable builders of a Western commonwealth.

2 Carlyle's long-delayed income from his books came first from reprints in America, managed by Emerson.