A system of general instruction which shall reach every description of our citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest, of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.-JEFFERSON. If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.-JEFFERSON.

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will ever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Learned institutions ought to be the favorite objects with every free people; they throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty. They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public agents of every description, more especially of those who are to frame the laws, by the perspicuity, the consistency, and the stability, as well as by the justice and equal spirit of which, the great social purposes are to be answered.— MADISON.

Let us, by all wise and constitutional means, promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.- MONROE.

There is but one method of preventing crime and of rendering a republican form of government durable, and that is by disseminating the seeds of virtue and knowledge through every part of the state by means of education; and this can be done effectually only by the interference and with the aid of the legislature. I am so deeply impressed with this opinion that were this the last evening of my life my parting advice to the guardians of the liberty of my country would be Establish and support public schools in every part of the State.-Dr. Rush.

I cannot be more perfectly convinced than I am that virtue and intelligence are the basis of our independence and the conservative principles of national and individual happiness.-CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL.

The parent who sends his son into the world uneducated defrauds the community of a useful citizen and bequeaths to it a nuisance.— CHANCELLOR Kent.

Open the door of the school-house to all the children of the land. Let no man have the excuse of poverty for not educating his own offspring. Place the means of education within his reach; and if they remain in ignorance, be it his own reproach. If one object of the expenditure of your revenue be protection against crime, you could not desire a better or cheaper means of obtaining it. Other nations spend their money in providing means for its detection and punishment, but it is for the principles of our Government to provide for its never occurring. The one acts by coercion, the other by prevention. On the diffusion of education among the people rests the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.- DANiel Webster.

The first duty of government, and the surest evidence of good government, is the encouragement of education. A general diffusion of knowledge is the precursor and protector of republican institutions, and in it we must confide as the conservative power that will watch over our liberties and guard them against fraud, intrigue, corruption, and violence. I consider the system of our common schools as the palladium of our freedom; for no reasonable apprehension can be entertained of its subversion as long as the great body of the people are enlightened by education. To increase the funds, to extend the benefits, and to remedy the defects of this excellent system is worthy of your most deliberate attention. I cannot recommend in terms too strong and impressive as munificent appropriations as the faculties of the State will authorize for all establishments connected with the interests of education, the

exaltation of literature and science, and the improvement of the human mind.-De WITT CLINTON.

If I had an archangel's trump, the blasts of which could startle the living of all the world, I would snatch it at this moment and sound it in the ears of all the people of the debtor States and of the States which have a solitary poor, unwashed, and uncombed child untaught at a free school, "Tax yourselves."

For what?

First. To pay your public State debt.

Second. To educate your children, every one of them, at common primary schools at State charge. - HENRY A. WISE, of Virginia.

It is your duty and your highest interest to provide and to maintain within the reach of every child the means of such an education as will qualify him to discharge the duties of a citizen of the Republic.-BISHOP DOANE, of New Jersey.

There is a positive antagonism between the possession of civil power requiring the highest exercise of reason and the want of that intelligence and integrity which are essential to the right use of reason itself. -E. D. MANSFIELD, LL. D.

Knowledge carries with it influence over the minds of others, and this influence is power; in free government, what is of more vital concern, it is political power.— GENERAL JOHN A. DIX.

The object of the common school system of Massachusetts was to give to every child in the Commonwealth a free, straight, solid pathway, by which he could walk directly up from the ignorance of an infant to a knowledge of the primary duties of a man, and could acquire a power and an invincible will to discharge them.-HORACE MANN. These are but a few of the many sayings that might be cited in this connection. It would be easy to add abundant evidences of a like relation of thought in the minds of men of other nations who have been the advocates of free government; but this is hardly to my purpose. Two extracts only I will present because of the men who speak and the part each has played in the history of that republic which is adding to the good things it offers for the imitation of the world some excellent models in the matter of primary education :

Universal education is henceforth one of the guarantees of liberty and social stability. As every principle of our government is founded on justice and reason, to diffuse education among the people, develop their understandings, and enlighten their minds is to strengthen their constitutional government and secure its stability.— GUIZOT.

We place the interest of the great question of public instruction above all personal quarrels, and it pleases me to see that in the midst of the inevitable antagonisms of public life all good citizens are united on this point. Of all the efforts of thinkers, writers, and statesmen, there is only one which is really efficacious, profound, and productive, viz, the diffusion of education—that social capital, the best of all capitals, which gives every man who comes into the world the means of gaining all other capitals, and thus of securing a position without force, without violence, without civil war.-LÉON GAMBETTA.

The idea common to these utterances is not a vain speculation: men have become Spartans or Corinthians according to their training; kings and priests have found in schools the most effective instrument for shaping men to their uses, and so, in turn, it has been made evident that "the arts and methods of the schoolmaster" may be employed to develop and maintain among a people the capacity for freedom. It is as agents for the accomplishment of this purpose that the common schools demand the serious and equal interest of all citizens.

The interest of the citizens, it must ever be remembered, counts for much more in the United States than elsewhere. What the education department is in England or the ministry of public instruction in Prussia, the people are in this country: the court of final appeal and of ultimate authority; they never have delegated and probably never will delegate their power in school matters so entirely to officials as to be themselves rid of the responsibility. This diffused authority has its disadvantages, as all who are engaged in the direct work of the schools experience; but it accords with the political instincts of our people; and when we view the operations of the system as a whole we cannot fail to be impressed with the evidences that the people have thus far. proved themselves equal to the trust they have assumed and which they so tenaciously hold.

EVIDENCES OF PROGRESS.

There is a period, a crude period, in American communities when the local spirit is the sole dependence of the school; but the time soon comes when the local spirit makes for progress only so far as it manifests itself in the united action of communities and formulates itself in laws binding alike upon all. This leads naturally to the appointment of executive officers interested equally in all the districts included in the operation of the law. The tendency to united action may be taken as marking a somewhat advanced stage of social life, and we have reason for satisfaction with the past and ground for hope as to the future in the fact that it has been so generally attained by us.

Individual districts have, it is true, in many instances failed to seize the opportune moment for combined action or to acquiesce in the results of such action; nevertheless, the principle has so far prevailed among us that a system of school supervision has been established in every State.

INFLUENCE OF SUPERVISING OFFICERS.

While comparatively little authority is vested in the officers of supervision they are the source of a great, often a determining, influence in school affairs. As a rule, State officers of education have not rested content with simply executing the laws already enacted. A few names of those who have been most prominent in the service, as Manu in Massachusetts, Barnard in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Flagg, Dix, and Randall in New York, Lord and Andrews in Ohio, Breckinridge in Kentucky, are sufficient to call to mind a long series of untiring, persistent efforts to enlighten the people as to the conditions of excellence in schools and to stimulate further legislation in their behalf. In the past, the general features of the State systems have received most attention: the compiling and codifying of school laws, the establishment of normal schools and of standards of qualification for teachers' licenses, the abolition of school rates and the increase of school taxes where these are meagre (as in the South), the consolidation of small districts

in the older Northern States, the management of school moneys, the construction of school-houses, and the care of school property are among the important measures that have been accomplished or accelerated by the efforts of supervising officers.

These measures have prepared the way for the more immediate consideration of the internal work of the schools.

What part, what beneficial part, each of the agents upon whose cooperation the efficiency of the schools depends will bear in this effort remains to be determined. Plans of action may be devised in the supervisory departments, but they cannot succeed without the support of the people on the one hand and of the teachers on the other. The want of such union has heretofore kept the rural schools from developing as rapidly as the circumstances of the country require, but we seem now to have reached a point when the union can be accomplished. The needs of the rural schools have been considered in recent meetings of teachers' associations and institutes and of the Department of Superintendence; conferences have been held between State and local school officers for the purpose of bringing about a better understanding of the subject, and many efforts have been put forth to rouse the people to a higher sense of their duties and privileges in this, respect. A great point will be gained when the people are so thoroughly determined upon maintaining a fair average of excellence in their schools that local school committees, who are their direct representatives, shall no longer be able to evade with impunity the plain intent of school laws, as, for instance, the law requiring that only licensed teachers shall be employed, which is practically null so long as local officers may and continually do influence the decision of examining bodies in the interest of incompetent candidates.

PRESENT CONDITION OF UNGRADED SCHOOLS.

When we consider that the rural schools of our country provide elementary instruction for more than one-half of our school population, and all the formal education that the majority of this half ever receive, and, further, the great diversity of conditions represented in this population, it seems strange that a people so fertile in expedients as our own should have adhered so closely as they have done to one type of rural school. The type is familiar to us all: A school composed of scholars of both sexes, ranging in study anywhere from the primer to Euclid, housed in a school-house of but one room and provided with one teacher, upon whom devolves all the instruction and discipline. Possibly the teacher changes every term; probably no systematic record of studies, classes, or progress is kept, and each teacher takes up the work as if nothing had gone before and ends it as if nothing were to follow. The teacher may be a person of excellent education, wise, conscientious, firm, loving, and versatile; many such there are, and "their works do praise them;" but a school may be favored in this respect one term and the

next pass into the charge of a callow youth, a crude girl, or a man or a woman of inferior mind and harsh, unsympathetic nature, who, for a consideration, makes "confusion worse confounded" in juvenile intellects. Of supervision there is little, of inspection less, and of standards of scholarship and tests of work none but those the teacher has wit enough to supply.

Such is the rural school as it exists among us to-day. Some of the best minds of the country have been fostered by this instrumentality, some of the noblest powers aroused and the highest aspirations kindled, but it is impossible that a high average of results should be attained under the circumstances.

If this be evident upon the survey of the schools themselves, how much more urgent appears the demand for their better organization and more efficient conduct when we turn our attention to what is going on in other countries, when we consider, for instance, that in England rural schools are subjected to an inspection as thorough as that which is applied to the city schools; that in France it is proposed to establish schools above the elementary grade accessible to all country chil dren; that in Belguim every country boy is trained in drawing, in the construction of geometrical forms, in the use of weights, measures, and surveyor's instruments, and in the analysis and application of whatever products his district supplies to the industrial arts; that in Germany and in Switzerland only well trained teachers are employed even in the most obscure districts.

The courses of instruction adopted in several of the foreign countries mentioned differ in important particulars from that usually followed in the United States. They are more practical, provide more efficiently for the combined training of hand, mind, and eye, as may appear hereafter. It is not, however, the purpose of this circular to discuss the comparative merits of different theories or courses of instruction, but rather to consider certain conditions that are required to give efficiency to any course. When these have been secured it will be easy to modify or extend a particular curriculum. In the consideration proposed it will be necessary to exclude schools that are too large to be managed by one teacher, and also those whose enrolment is so small that the force and enthusiasm of numbers are wanting. If the average attendance of a school be less than twenty scholars, it is better that it should be combined with the school of an adjoining district, and, if the average attendance be above thirty-five or forty and the ages and attainments of pupils greatly vary, an assistant is needed. With schools enrolling between twenty and forty pupils, good results are assured if the teacher be well qualified and properly supported.

THE TEACHING FORCE.

Wherever the education of the masses is attempted, the problem chiefly discussed is how to secure competent teachers. It is indeed no