that Hon. G. J. Orr, superintendent of Georgia schools, make the convention acquainted with the needs of education in his State.

Mr. Orr's brief remarks, to the same effect as those already given in the proceedings at the meeting in 1879, are here omitted. His remarks at that meeting are given in extenso (pp. 46-58).

Mr. PHILBRICK expressed the warm sympathy felt by the educators and the people of Massachusetts for the difficulties encountered by Dr. Orr and his fellow workers, and said that he was heartily in favor of establishing an educational fund as provided in the bills now before Congress. He thought the income of such a fund should be distributed for ten years on the ratio of the illiteracy; this plan he much preferred to that of distributing the money according to the territorial area. The object of giving the money should be to give help where help is most needed, and not to put a premium on an accident. He recognized the responsibility of the National Government, and would have Congress begin by supporting education in the District of Columbia. The speaker was glad to bear his grateful testimony to the uniform and cordial support that educators in Massachusetts had always received from the honorable gentleman (Mr. Loring) during his service as a member of the State legislature.

Mr. ORR wished to add that, in his opinion, the Southern States would not wish to receive aid from the national funds unless they were held accountable for the manner of spending the same, as provided in the bills pending before Congress.

Mr. HENDERSON said that this measure (Mr. Hoar's bill) solves two problems for Kentucky. When he became State superintendent, Kentucky was without any system of education for the colored people. He devised the best he could; he tried to do what he thought was right, but his plan was more liberal than any the legislature would adopt. The law gives the colored people every dollar of their taxes for education, and in towns their part of the municipal tax also. The taxes paid by colored people have doubled in three years. The provision was made that, if the Congress of the United States should give the States the proceeds of the sale of the public land, the appropriation of that money should go to the colored people until the per capita of colored children equalled that of the white children. The second point is that the bill solves the normal school problem for Kentucky. The speaker felt a great deal of interest in this bill, and expected to stay long enough to use such influence as he had to see it through. In office for six years by a vote of 235,000 citizens of Kentucky, the speaker claimed to know something of the wants of the State.

Mr. BOWMAN said that there seemed to be but one sentiment about those bills, and he wanted to thank his friend from Massachusetts. On motion, the Department adjourned, to meet at 10 o'clock the following morning.

THIRD SESSION-WEDNESDAY MORNING.

WASHINGTON, D. C., December 12, 1877. The Department reassembled at 10 o'clock. The President called attention to letters from A. P. Stone, superintendent of public schools, Springfield, Mass.; James C. Weaver, county superintendent of Accomack County, Va.; R. D. Shannon, State superintendent of public schools, Missouri; and S. M. Etter, superintendent of public instruction, Illinois.

EDUCATION AT THE PARIS EXPOSITION.

The committee on the Paris Exposition made the following report: The committee appointed to consider the question of the representation of the educational interests of the country at the Paris Exposition respectfully report the following propositions:

1. That we consider it of the utmost importance that the educational interests of the country should be represented at the Paris Exposition.

2. That the President be earnestly requested to appoint as one of the paid commissioners provided for in the act of Congress a competent scientific expert in matters of education to organize and take charge of the educational exhibit of the United States, and to report upon Group II of the Exposition, relating to education, instruction, and products of the liberal arts.

3. That the President be also requested to appoint a fair proportion of the honorary commissioners with reference to their special qualifications either to assist in organizing such an exhibition as is contemplated by Group II or in reporting upon the question of education as therein exemplified.

4. That an effort be made to have set apart a fair share of the appropriation made by Congress for the organization and installation of the educational exhibit.

5. That the commissioners assigned to take charge of the educational exhibit be urged to establish as soon as practicable a headquarters, at the port from which the goods are to be shipped, for the purpose of receiving articles and arranging the exhibit.

6. That, if the measures above indicated be substantially adopted, we pledge ourselves to unite in an effort to have the educational interests of the whole country adequately represented in all their departments, means, methods, and results; but, if these interests should be ignored in the appointment of commissioners or in the distribution of the money appropriated, we deem it impossible to make an exhibition that will be creditable to the country.

7. That a copy of this report, signed by the officers of the department, be placed in the hands of the President of the United States and such other authorities as may be proper to advise concerning our views on this subject.

8. That the committee be continued, for the purpose of carrying what is herein proposed into practical effect.

The report was adopted.

AMERICAN EDUCATION.

President Wickersham then introduced Hon. GEORGE B. LORING, M. C., of Massachusetts, who delivered the following address:

Gentlemen, I trust it will not seem inappropriate to discuss briefly in a business meeting of the representatives of the educational organizations of our country the aim

and object of American education. Not an expert, but merely an interested observer, with some past experience both as teacher and learner, I present my views with diffdence and distrust. The efforts now made to cultivate the popular mind by all the appliances of college and academy and high school and schools of industrial art command my most profound respect, and those who are engaged in their development and control command my warmest sympathy. In what I say, therefore, I would in no way criticise their service. But I desire to offer some suggestions on the general culture of the youthful mind, which may perhaps serve to broaden and strengthen the work now so well performed. An intense devotion to an organized system, and a deep desire to perfect it, may at times contract our sphere of vision and confine our efforts. If this has occurred in our educational work in any way, I think it will do no harm at least to remember that a broad general culture of the mind is necessary to prepare it for education for a specific purpose, and that by such general culture can the object of American education be best attained.

In considering American education generally, and to some extent abstractly, I shall discuss

1. The kind of intellectual culture the colonists brought with them, and their object in founding institutions of learning;

2. The American characteristics which have been developed and strengthened by education of every variety; and

3. The practical matters which should be applied to the work of American education: the relations which should be established between teacher and pupil, especially in a country like ours; the extent to which graded schools can be wisely and profitably carried on; the school-house best adapted to the educational work in which we are engaged; and the influence which the pupils may and should exercise upon each other.

In doing this our attention is first attracted by what is usually known as the academic system, which grew up with the American colonies and has received the special care of the American Republic; and by this I do not mean a system of classical culture alone, but a system of mixed and general education. In the hands of the founders of the state here this system became identified with the establishment of education upon a popular basis, emancipated from all control as a privilege and extended and confirmed to all as a right. It is a remarkable and interesting fact that the emancipation of science from ecclesiastical tyranny and intellectual arrogance by Bacon and the establishment of a state upon recognized popular principles occurred at about the same time. The first half of the seventeenth century in England was distracted by intellectual and moral and religions protests. Bacon in science, Milton in literature, Cromwell and Hampden and Pym in politics, all represented that advancing and protesting force which has given England her power and sent a democratie vitality into the colonies, which were largely peopled and almost universally inspired by independent Englishmen. It was an era of right and not of privilege. The hard lines of scholasticism were breaking up. Great scholars were scholars for the people and not for the schools. The Protestants and non-conformists and separatists of England could not accept as a guide to their thought a system of philosophy which was made indisputable by the doctrines of a church whose ecclesiastical authority they denied, whose spiritual guidance they rejected. The learned men of England who watched and many of whom took part in the colonizing of America had long applied their minds to the investigation of problems connected with the best systems of popular government. When William Brewster was graduated at Cambridge in 1585 he carried his excellent scholarship at once into the work of guiding and counselling that little band of pilgrims who were then waiting at Scrooby for an opportunity to found an empire on freedom of conscience in matters of religion, a popular government on the consent of the governed. Occupying a high position among the progressive and independent thinkers of his time, he became familiar with the doctrines which disestablished the church in the most religious and fervid spot on earth in that day, and

which shook the throne of England. What a defiant crowd of scholars, taught in the same school, inspired by the same thought and speculation, bent on the same purpose, flocked to these shores, bringing the independent spirit of the Protestant with them, under the care of the Huguenots of Carolina, the Covenanters of New Jersey, the Puritans of New England, and the Quakers of Pennsylvania! When Roger Williams came to this New World and found no rest for the sole of his foot until he had established for himself an opportunity to exercise the most "unqualified freedom of conscience under human government," he brought with him the culture which controlled the most powerful of England in his day. When Sir Harry Vane brought to the gubernatorial chair of the Massachusetts Bay colony a spirit of liberality and freedom which called around him the liberty loving men of that day, and clothed him with a power which Winthrop himself in support of magisterial authority could barely overthrow, he came fresh from Oxford and the best schools of Holland and Germany, imbued with that spirit of learning which neither church nor state could subdue, and which won for him the divine tribute of Milton's verse and an immortality in that great chapter of the world's history-that chapter in which is recorded the founding of civil and religious freedom in America. And so came Endicott and Hooker and Cotton and Raleigh, familiar with the faces of those who are now to us the classic English writers, born of a people who were untamed and untamable in their self-assertion, who were nurtured on the sublimest English poetry, upon whose heaven-kissing summits the poets of all succeeding generations have been gazing with hopeless wonder and admiration, and on the most defiant English philosophy, which opened the path trod by all modern investigation; a people who declared for freedom and then fearlessly struck for it; who asserted a prerogative and then demanded a right; who in the Old World now rally round a throne as the insignia of their national power, and in the New World stand by a Constitution as the expression and embodiment of their social and civil principles. Born as these men were of controversy, dialectics, and debate, they strove with each other on the "weightier matters of the law," and disputed with ecclesiastical fervor upon the covenant and the doctrines, until the integrity and safety of the state itself seemed involved in the controversy. The pious zeal of John Endicott in executing the laws against those who differed from the religion of the colony; the political ardor of John Winthrop in organizing a defeat for Sir Harry Vane as governor of the colony on account of his defense of Mrs. Hutchinson against the bigotry of the colonial clergy, mark the spirit and character of the controversies which sprang up in those early days of civil and religious freedom. But on one point they united: the establishment of a popular system of education in which all might have a share; a system intended to cultivate all men into a fitness for the enjoyment of the privileges of a free state and for the exercise of its rights, they never forgot and never neglected. They might exhaust themselves over "fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute;" they might rend the state itself in a contest over the covenant and the half way covenant, the civil rights of communicants and non-communicants, but for the cause of common education they joined hands and poured forth liberally from their resources in support of the schoolhouse and the college. It was education which had filled their minds with the doctrines of freedom, and they believed that through education all men could be brought to a true understanding of the church of Christ and to an intelligent exercise of their rights as citizens of a free state. For the disputations of the schools they substituted the debates of the town meeting; for the private school they substituted the district school-house, open to all; for a corporation of learning they substituted a republic of letters. They left behind them a system of state and society in which education would naturally confine itself to narrow channels, and they entered upon the organization of a state whose power would arise and increase from a general diffusion of knowledge through all ranks and orders of men. On the soil which they reclaimed and occupied has grown up a system of education which offers its blessings to all, which indeed would compel all to partake of its living waters; a system supported and de

veloped by the liberality and care of the state, and so universally organized that it would be easier to escape from the influences of the sun than from the omnipresence of the American school-house. They left behind them in the old country the general belief that the masses of the people require no education and that to cultivate their minds is simply to render them restless and discontented; and they left behind them also the general custom of endowment schools and universities, in the former of which the teacher and the endowment alone remained, and in the latter of which a privileged class enjoyed the entire benefit of the modes of instruction. To this western hemisphere they gave a republic of civil freedom; to the world they gave an impulse of popular education that in our own day has made the land they left the abode not only of the great universities but of a widespread and universal organization in which three millions of children are annually taught and to support which more than eight millions of dollars are annually appropriated. Had the American colonists done nothing more than this-had they failed to establish an independent nationality, and simply organized their popular school system—they would have accomplished a work for which their memories would ever be held in grateful remembrance; a work whose influence is now felt wherever the light of civilization shines; a work in the performance of which the most powerful and enlightened nations of our day are engaged in a generous and honorable rivalry.

THE NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS DEVELOPED BY EDUCATION.

The spirit which animated the early founders of the American system of popular education also established to a very considerable extent the object which that system has always had in view, the result to which it naturally tends. In cultivating the minds of a people, the most striking effect produced is the intensifying and strengthening of their national characteristics. It is culture which makes a nation most deeply national, gives new warmth to its vitality, new vigor to its powers, fresh impetuosity to its national impulses, a keener edge to its intellectual faculties, loftier purpose, a higher destiny. It is not surprising, then, that the institutions of learning scattered freely throughout our land should have preserved and magnified those characteristics which not only gave to us existence as a people, but gave peculiar significance and power to our introduction among the nations of the earth. The love of freedom, the hatred of oppression, the devotion to an independent form of faith, the intense individualism which marked the early career of the American colonists, have all been nourished and developed into broader and stronger life by our national experience and education of more than two centuries. The Puritanism of to-day, though perhaps somewhat modified, is a warmer and more defiant Puritanism than that brought hither by Endicott and Winthrop. The liberalism of John Robinson and his pilgrim band, broad as it was at Plymouth, is broader and freer to-day in all Massachusettsperhaps in all North America. The strong powers of our childhood have been cultivated into the stronger powers of our manhood; and I think it is not too much to say that while we have retained and increased the forces, we have triumphed over and eradicated many of the weaknesses of our high toned and defiant, and at the same time bigoted, and perhaps suspicious and overwatchful, ancestors.

The foremost object and effect of two centuries and a half of popular education on this continent has been to deepen and develop our nationality. It has produced an abundant crop of American citizens—not subjects, not persons destined to specific duties, high and low, but citizens, clothed with obligations and responsibilities, and supplied with abundant opportunities for the exercise of all their faculties. When Samuel Adams took his master's degree at Harvard in 1743, he selected as a subject for his thesis the following question, which his career has made immortal: "An supremo magistratui resistere liceret, si aliter servari respublica nequit?" ("Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the com ommonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.") While Thomas Jefferson was yet an infant in his cradle, on the beautiful banks of the Rivanna, this Boston boy, educated in the Boston schools and filled