country. Her art treasures are great, her historical monuments are numerous, her people are genial, kind-hearted, and ambitious. She has much in common with us; we are both Teutonic, and this persists through time and space. Berlin is New York half awake, and should an American be half asleep he might mistake the former for the latter. But, recurring to the question of universities, the advantages are not so apparent. In the last fifteen years, American universities have advanced so much and the German so little that the old gulf between them is closing up, perhaps is closed up for American students, in all departments save philology and medicine. There is a general and almost impregnable superstition in America, and even in Great Britain, about German universities and scholarship. I believe that four out of every five students who have been more than one year in the German university will ultimately justify their sojourn there on the ground that a German degree is worth more and counts for more than an American degree. And this is strictly true. American colleges and universities, with some few exceptions, are so reckless in distributing their paper that there is not a single degree given in America that necessarily means anything. A degree from a first class German university means something definite and becomes more definite by being itself graded.

III.

THE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL. (I)

The High School is the culmination of the American common school system. Its main office, though not its only function, is to serve as the final stage in the course designed to prepare boys and girls for entrance upon the duties of active life. ' Taking its pupils from the elementary schools at about the age of fourteen, when by nine years of previous school life they have acquired a considerable store of facts, and have gained some facility in the use of their mental equipment, it proceeds to organize and co-ordinate their loosely aggregated knowledge, to give strength and precision to their mental faculties by supervising the acquisition of other and more complex trains of facts, and also to develop additional powers, especially those involved in the processes of reasoning. For four rich years• this work is carried on, till the pupils are sent forth at eighteen or nineteen, in the bloom of their youth, to make for themselves practical applications of the principles which their teachers have aimed to inculcate.

That schools of this general nature are a necessity to civilization scarcely needs a word of proof. A glance at educational history shows that such means of culture have been demanded and provided whenever and wherever education has been highly valued. It is claimed that they were common in the principal towns of Scotland as early as the twelfth century. Professor Payne has pointed out the significance of the fact that the English Public School, the French Lycée and College Communal, the German Gymnasium and Realschule, the New England Academy, and the American High School are all intitutions of the same general type and fulfill the same general function. It is, indeed, worthy of note that this institution meets the intellectual needs and aspirations of three such races as the Anglo-Saxon, the Teutonic, and the Latin-the domi

nant races of the world. Nor is the period of time through which this kind of school has lived and flourished devoid of meaning. Eton was founded in the fifteenth century, Harrow in the sixteenth, and early in the seventeenth century Comenius, the greatest educational benefactor of continental Europe, introduced the Gymnasium into his plan for universal education. Over so wide an area, then, and through four centuries of history, this idea has had a trial, and in point of vigor and general acceptance its latter days are its best days. Is not this at once a most convincing proof of its utility and necessity, and a prophecy of life and honor long to come?

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

The American High School is less than a century old. It is true that the Public Latin School of Boston, the oldest existing High School, which admirably represents the classical side of secondary training, has a history of continuous service for two centuries and a half; but in its earlier years it was rather a grammar school, so called, than a free, public High School. To Boston, however, belongs the honor of establishing, in 1821, the first typical High School, the English High School, an institution peculiar to the present century, repre-/ senting the best English education. Five years later, in consequence of an enactment by the Legislature of Massachusetts, other High Schools began to spring up in that State. numbered fully a dozen before the idea was adopted by any other State. In 1837 Philadelphia founded its Central High School, and in 1839 Baltimore established its City College (a boys' High School). These city schools were for boys only. An attempt was made by Boston, in 1826, to open a High School for girls, but after a single year "the enterprise was abandoned because of its great success; to give such an education to both sexes involved too great expense." This honor was left, therefore, to some of the country towns,' and to Philadelphia, which city, after trying for three years its experiment with a High School for boys, established, in 1840, a simi- •

New Bedford, in 1827, opened a High School for both sexes.

These

lar school for girls. Providence, in 1843, on opening its High School, received both boys and girls. It was not until 1849 that New York founded its Free Academy, now known as the City College

Though so modern an institution, the High School is the outgrowth of two ideas which are as old as the founding of New England: the responsibility of the State for the education of its children, and a high regard for liberal education.. In the fifth year of the settlement of Boston (April 13, 1635), the people, in town meeting assembled, requested "Brother Philemon Purmont to become schoolmaster for the teaching and nurturing of children," and voted him in part pay for his services thirty acres of land.. A garden plot was also granted to "Danyell Maude, schoolmaster." These men are thought to have been respectively the first public and private schoolteachers in the colony. But the schools of that time, while free in the sense that all classes were at liberty to send children to them, and public in the sense that the people's money assisted in the support of them, were not what we now term free public schools. Their main support came from the fees paid by the parents, and not from public funds.

In the year following (September 8, 1636) the General Court of Massachusetts voted the sum of four hundred pounds, a sum equal to the entire annual revenue of the colony, "toward a school or college." This assembly, over which Sir Henry Vane presided, is believed to have been "the first body in which the people, by their representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of education." The founders of the American nation are thus seen to have felt a responsibility for education in its higher as well as in its lower aspects. The Massachusetts School Law of 1642 laid upon the several towns (townships) the responsibility for "the training up of children in learning and labor." But it was in 1647 (November 11) that the school system of the colony-the earliest system established by any community in the new world-had its real birth. In the enactment of that year occurs the following reference to the germ of the modern high school:

'And it is further ordered that where any towne shall increase to the number of 100 families or householders, they shall set up a grammar schoole, the master thereof being able to instruct youths so far as they may be fited for the University; provided that if any towne neglect the performance hereof above one yeare, then every such towne shall pay five pounds to the next schoole, till they shall perform this order."2 A similar code was enacted in Connecticut three years later.

The "grammar school" thus provided for was an institution that grew up alongside of the earliest colonial colleges, and sometimes antedated them. Such schools were intended to prepare their pupils for the colleges by supplementing with a classical training the meager elementary instruction received in the lower schools and at home. Latin, Greek, and mathematics were their main studies, and in early times seem to have been thoroughly taught. Mather, in his Magnalia, says: "When scholars had so far profited at the grammar schools that they could read any classical author into English, and readily make and speak true Latin, and write it in verse as well as in prose, and perfectly decline the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, they were judged capable of admission to Harvard College." This standard speaks well for the early scholarship of both "grammar school" and college. These ancient preparatory schools derived their name and typical character from the old cathedral grammar schools in England, or the cloister schools of the monasteries. They were in New England, however, intensely local, and only in rare cases sufficiently well supported or endowed to become permanently successful. The Boston Latin School and the Hopkins Grammar Schools at New Haven and Cambridge were among the earliest and best representatives of these local fitting schools; and Ezekiel Cheever, first at New Haven (1638) and finally at Boston (1708), was the most famous "master." The time came, however, when classical culture

Massachusetts Colonial Records, vol. ii, p. 203. It is interesting to note that this penalty of "five pounds" was equivalent to the work of a common laborer for two hundred days. By 1718 it had been increased to sixty pounds.