The latter gentleman took the lead in boldly advocating the most liberal provision in respect to space, and, in accordance with his view, it was voted to request the City Council to purchase the whole. square bounded by Dartmouth, Montgomery, and Clarendon streets, and Warren avenue, with the exception of the corner occupied by the Clarendon-street Church, comprising 101,600 square feet. Through what a protracted and wearying series of discussions, conferences, solicitations, and manœuvrings this agreement as to the site was at last reached, I have good reason to remember. But the real struggle was yet to come, to procure the favorable action of the City Council. It lasted six months. Failure to obtain this particular lot, which had long been held by an honorable capitalist with the expectation that it would be wanted for some public institution, would result, as it seemed to me, not only in an indefinite postponement of the much-needed provision for the accommodation of these important schools, but in the necessity, in the end, of accepting a site, or sites, far less desirable; and so I felt it to be my duty to do what I could to secure it. But the difficulty of the task far exceeded all my calculations. It would require more space than can be allowed here to analyze the contest in all its details. In both branches of the City Council there were able and persistent opponents of the measure, and they were greatly helped in their opposition by the owners of certain rights in passage-ways which must be acquired, who put exorbitant prices upon their property, and the equally unreasonable demands of the trustees of the " Washingtonian Home" for an indispensable corner of the lot, upon which they were pushing forward, during all the time, the construction of a large building for an inebriates' asylum, to be pulled down in case of purchase, as it was. The recently annexed districts of the city, being already provided with five fully equipped High Schools, were generally indifferent or opposed to the measure, as one promising little or no direct advantage to them. Of course the irrepressible tax-payer," who would limit public instruction to the three R's, did what he could through the press and otherwise to defeat the enterprise; and to cap the climax, in the very crisis of the struggle our enemies were reinforced by aid and comfort from the coëducation camp. One of the ablest chiefs of that persuasion wrote for one of the leading papers a long, elaborate, and disingenuous article, full of misstatements of facts and pedagogical heresies, urging that this purchase should not be allowed until the

School Board should decide that the sexes should be mixed in all the High Schools.

Early in the contest the friends of the measure found it necessary to make a concession of the vacant corner on Clarendon street, and of the Dartmouth-street corner, occupied by the dwelling houses above referred to; thus reducing the area to 84,100 feet, and the cost from $415,000 to $280,000. The substantial success finally achieved required as hard fighting and as much courage as any educational conflict in which it has been my fortune to be engaged. And it is but just to say here, that the battle would have been lost, and the building would not have been built, without the unflinching persistence of two courageous and efficient coöperators, Mr. Charles J. Prescott, then chairman of the Committee on Schoolhouses of the School Board, and Mr. Cyrus A. Page, a member of the Common Council. And then, at the end, all these efforts would have gone for nothing but for what seemed to be a providential favor. The narrow escape from failure is thus stated by the City Clerk: The order was passed by the City Council Nov. 7, 1872, to buy the lot. The order was approved on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 9, 1872, and on that night occurred the great fire. It is safe to say that had not the order been passed that day, the land would not have been purchased at all."

THE PLAN AND DESIGN, HOW ORIGINATED AND PERFECTED.

The great fire, which came so near being disastrous to the project, turned out to be one of the causes of its ultimate success, by necessitating delay in building. Had the work gone forward with despatch, as intended, the edifice erected would have been without doubt a substantial and costly one, and fully up to the standard of the best in the country; but it would not have been up to the standard of the best school-houses in the world, as this building is, for the simple reason that the knowledge requisite did not exist in this country. The mass of the pupils in the public schools of Boston had better accommodations than those of any large city in the world; but we had no one school-house equal to the best in the world. The characteristics of the best school-houses in this country were well known to me, and I had some knowledge of school architecture abroad; but it was not until I visited the Akademische Gymnasium, in Vienna, at the time of the Universal Exposition of 1873, that I was able to picture in my mind the image of such a building as we wanted in Boston for these two schools. The study

there begun was followed up by visits to other first-class highschool buildings, not only in that city of wonderful schools, but in all the principal cities of Germany. In this way a valuable collection of views, plans, and descriptions of the best specimens was obtained.

The following paragraph on this topic is quoted from my report [October, 1873], on the exhibit of the Boston school system at the Vienna Exposition:

"In respect to school architecture, while we made a better showing than any other American city, we were quite eclipsed by some of the European cities; that is, in some of the foreign cities school-houses have recently been erected which are architecturally and pedagogically superior to anything we have to show. The City of Vienna has individual school buildings vastly better than the best in Boston; but if you take all the school buildings in Vienna, the good and bad together, the average accommodations afforded to all the children of that city are perhaps not equal to the average of the accommodations provided for the children in Boston. What I mean to say is this, that Vienna knows how to build, and has built school edifices which are more durable, more safe, more convenient, more costly, and more beautiful, than any Boston has yet built, or is likely to build, in the near future. The reason of this is, that in Vienna, when a school-house is planned, it is done by the combined science and wisdom of the most accomplished architects, and the most accomplished pedagogists. No mere whim of a schoolmaster, and no mere whim of an inexperienced and uneducated architect, is allowed to control the design."

Early in 1874 an attempt was made to get an agreement upon the essentials of a plan to be recommended to the City Council, for the School Board had no authority whatever in determining what the plan should be. As was to be expected, foreign notions were not at once very highly appreciated. However, after much discussion and many conferences and hearings, the conflicting views of the members of the committees on the two schools, of their principals, and of the Committee on School-houses, were so far harmonized that permission was given me, with certain instructions, to draw up a Description" of the accommodations to be provided. For designs in conformity with this "Description" the committee on Public Buildings of the City Council offered four premiums of $1,000, $800, $600, and $400.

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The competing architects had free use of the collection of

foreign illustrations of school architecture above referred to. The four designs thus obtained were not without merit, and the amount paid for them was, in my judgment, well expended. But the best of them was far from being all that could be desired, and yet one of them would no doubt have been adopted, had not a supposed necessity for retrenchment in school expenses prevented an appropriation for a building at that time. The delay thus occasioned afforded a chance for another trial under more favorable auspices. In the mean time an act was passed by the Legislature, providing that no school-house should be built by the City Council until the plans thereof should have been approved by the School Board; and the School Board thereupon made a rule requiring the Superintendent to give his opinion in writing upon every plan proposed before the action of the Board upon the question of the approval of the same; and the City Council created the office of City Architect, choosing Mr. Clough as the first incumbent. These new conditions made success possible. Previously the designs of our school-houses had been made by architects who were not devoted to school architecture as a specialty. Too often the architect having the most talent for wire-pulling, or having the strongest friends at court, would be selected rather than the one having the best qualifications for designing school-houses. The School Board had no authoritative voice in the matter, and the Superintendent could only advise and solicit and remonstrate. Hence the slow progress; hence the perpetuation of defects after they are discovered and pointed out. But the situation was now materially changed for the better. The chance of getting a bad design was immensely diminished, and the adoption of an undesirable one was impossible without an exposure of its defects, if the Superintendent happened to have the requisite knowledge and firmness. The city architect entered upon his work in a manner worthy of all praise. Four primary and two grammar school-houses were the fruits of his first two years' studies. Of these the Prince School, on Back Bay, was the one which most distinctly marked the new departure in school architecture, which we owe to German pedagogy and Mr. Clough's talent, and his devotion to the duties of his office. The exhibition of the plans of this building at the Philadelphia Exposition has

These provisions had been suggested in my report for 1874, as follows: "If there had been, during the last twenty years, a competent architect in the employ of the city, wholly devoted to this department, and if the School Committee had been invested by law with a veto power in regard to all plans, the result would have been far better than what we now see."

already borne fruit, as was seen in the prize designs exhibited last year in New York. It is to be regretted that circumstances prevented the architect from giving this modest but admirable building the proper aesthetic character. It is especially interesting as being the best study preparatory to the master-piece.

At length, after the lapse of seven years from the time Mr. Z. Jellison introduced into the School Board an order requesting the City Council to procure a suitable lot upon which to erect a building for the accommodation of the English High School," the City Architect received instructions, in January, 1877, to prepare the design for this double school-house. He took hold of the project with the true art spirit, aiming at perfection and sparing no pains to realize it. He had in hand the best information on the subject to be obtained at home and abroad. The "description " above referred to was taken as the basis of his instructions, but such modifications were made as he and the Superintendent saw fit to agree upon, and they were always in harmony on every point, so that when the latter came to give his official opinion on the completed design as submitted to the School Board, he had nothing to say about it except that it was in all respects satisfactory. The School Board voted its approval of the design in June, 1877, without requesting any change in its provisions. A copy of the design was taken by me to the Paris Exposition of 1878, as the best new thing in the way of school progress Boston had to show, and it was one of the prominent motives which secured the award of a gold medal by the international jury on secondary education.

THE APPROPRIATIONS AND COST.

The order to build, accompanied with the requisite appropriation, was not reached until nearly five years after the purchase of the lot. This delay was, as has been intimated, primarily due to the great fire and the subsequent financial crisis. But it must be attributed in part to the rather exceptionally conservative views respecting school expenditures held by the two excellent mayors of that period. The incumbent who came into the office of mayor in 1877, the Hon. Frederick O. Prince, taking a different view of the matter, lost no time in declaring himself in favor of a liberal appropriation for the building. I cannot help remarking here, that, in taking this stand, he acted, not only like a filial son of his alma mater, the old Latin School, but that he acted in full accord with the noble example afforded by the speech of Mayor Quincy, the