labor of educating the whole people. It was a movement destined to partial failure by the circumstances of the case. The old wellto-do class was in poverty, for a time disfranchised, and in a state of obstinate resistance to the whole order of affairs. There was no money to support the large expense, no suitable outfit of buildings, no body of competent teachers, and, more than all, no belief in the system itself by the large majority of educated and professsional people. The Northern officials were not veteran educators, but young soldiers and politicians, profoundly ignorant of Southern society, even when honestly attempting to establish in South Carolina and Mississippi the common school system of Massachusetts and Ohio. There was also the usual amount of plunder, rascality, and general diabolism that inevitably follows the attempt to govern an American State by the military and centralizing methods of old-world administration. No wonder that, under these conditions, the new system of Southern common schools established and generally put in operation during these years should have failed to realize the enthusiastic expectations of the North, and should generally have been largely modified as soon as the majority of the Southern white population were restored to their political status and once more resumed control of public affairs.

Yet, it will remain a perpetual wonder that so much was really done, even under these unpromising circumstances. Large sums of money were contributed by the National Government, through the Freedman's Bureau, and by private contributors at the North; great numbers of teachers from the same States, and even from the Canadas and abroad, pressed into the work, and occupation was given to many Southern people; many thousands of children in all these States were gathered in schools, and more was accomplished than can be described through the clumsy vocabulary of educational statistics. In the school reports a thousand children are but a thousand "figureheads." But the fifty good heads in that motley crowd, destined to "figure" in the rising educational work of their State for a generation, can only be known through the widespread influence for good of their magnetic manhood and womanhood. Several important points were made during these ten stormy years in which, like a child born on shipboard in a tempest, the present southern American common school saw the light; its cradle rocked by high winds; its very existence in perpetual peril; yet, by the help of a protecting Providence, coming into port at last with a sturdy pair of legs of its own, prepared to run the children's race through coming years.

LXXXI.

The first great point was that the large number of Southern people of the poorer white and colored sort who, for years had been longing for educational opportunities, found in this movement their first chance of securing for their own children, often for themselves and the whole

population they represented, the inestimable blessing of free education. To them must be added the considerable number of the ruling class who had always been in sympathy with these views, and, even in face of the displeasure of their own friends, had joined with more or less vigor in the work.

Second. A large number of persons of competent education, many of them old teachers, were either persuaded to resume work or forced by pecuniary necessity to teach. Besides them, an opportunity was offered for occupation to a considerable class of educated men and women in reduced circumstances to earn a living in the schoolroom. What with the revival of the colleges, academies, and private in addition to the public schools, the demand for teachers was never so great. Indeed, it was almost the only place where an educated woman could earn her bread. So, at once there began that movement of superior Southern womanhood upon this profession which has become the most characteristic feature of the new education in the South. A part, and a most important part it has already become, of this movement was the introduction of colored men and women as teachers in the common schools of their race. It is impossible to measure by any Anglo-Saxon standard the mighty import of the fact that even an hundred young men and women, born in slavery, within twenty years were standing, with the support of public authority in the State of their birth, on the teacher's platform, instructing the first generation of the five millions of their people ever invited to come in at the open door of the people's common school.

Third. For the first time in these years these States seriously entered on the critical experiment of public taxation for universal educa tion. No Southern State before this had taken the position that the schooling of the whole people is a just and legitimate claim upon the property of the Commonwealth. Whole classes of the Southern people still do not accept this, the fundamental theory of the American common school, as is shown by the constant complaint of the injustice of educating the Negro at the expense largely of the white property holders, as if this were not the corner stone of the system-that in consideration of the contribution of labor in the creation of wealth, wealth should be freely taxed for that enlightenment of the masses which makes labor more profitable, property more secure, and works generally for the common good; and that this assessment shall be made by the vote of the whole people, since the whole people contribute to the prosperity of the State. In this case there was injustice, in that the superior class had little voice in legislation and the ignorant masses were in the hands of political "rings." But the great principle was so effectively driven into the average Southern mind that no reaction has dislodged it to the present day.

Fourth. A great many schoolhouses were built and school property purchased by national or Northern funds during this period. Some of the colleges, for a time, were used by the public authorities.

LXXXII.

On the whole this ten years work can not be justly called the imposition of the Northern public school system upon the conquered South, as is even now asserted by unreconciled opponents. It was rather the one department of the provisional or "carpetbag" State govern. ments that met a long felt and deeply-seated necessity of Southern society. For this reason it was hailed by thousands of good people in political opposition to their government and welcomed with unspeakable joy and gladness by the entire population whose educational needs had been neglected ander the old régime. And how large that portion of the white people was, none of the recent Southern historians of the old-time school system seems to know or cares to tell. The positive assertion of a class of Southern educators, that the present illiteracy of Southern white people is one of the results of the war, is pure assertion, unsupported by fact. There was no system of educational statistics in any of these States before 1860. But enough can be gathered from the most authentic sources to show the absurdity of this claim. There was, doubtless, during this period as during the war, a suspension of school life to large numbers of the children of the more favored class, and this accounts in a measure for the coöperation of many of these people even then with the movement for the only schools which, in their impoverished condition, they could use. But the slaveholding class, all told, never included one-third the white population of the South. Thus, to multitudes of the remaining white people, this establishment of the free common school came as the first fruits of their own emancipation into that intelligent and independent citizenship which, in the brief period of twenty-five years, has made the "third estate of the South" virtually the controlling political power in the majority of these States.

Outside of the eleven ex-Confederate were the four old border States, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri, in which this peculiar system spoken of did not prevail, besides the new State of West Vir ginia. In all these Commonwealths, especially Maryland, West Vir ginia, and Missouri, the work of popular education was at once taken up, and under the eminent leadership of educators like Dr. Newell, Dr. Harris, and a brilliant corps of teachers great results were achieved. In the Central States also, notably in Virginia and Tennessee, the work began soon after the close of the war, and under the superinten-. dency of John Eaton, Dr. Ruffner, Superintendent Binford, the Peabody Normal School, at Nashville, and the remarkable body of public school men and women that have always kept Virginia and Tennessee the most hopeful of the ex-Confederate Southern States in popular education, decisive results were obtained, while several of the Gulf States had not yet overcome their enforced political apprenticeship.

LXXXIII.

But through all these troubled years, up to 1880, one steady beam of light penetrated the confused twilight, and one calm, penetrating voice of encouragement cheered the heart of every patriot educator through these sixteen heavily burdened and sorely stricken Commonwealths.

Never was the good providence of God more signally manifested than in the inspiration of George Peabody, a New England boy, for the establishment of the great educational fund called by his name. The organization and administration of this magnificent charity seem to have been, even to the present day, under the same protection. In its presidency, Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, of Massachusetts, has richly earned the title to a statesmanship of education that will abide when myriads of great political names have floated down the tide of time.

No man in the United States was so fitted for the delicate, almost perilous office of first secretary of this board as Dr. Barnas Sears, of New England. For thirteen years this strong, wise, and sweet scholar and divine traversed all these States, rocking amid the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of reconstruction politics, "bearing gifts," of which the least were the moderate sums of money at his disposal, the best, those words of sympathy, friendly encouragement, common sense, and manly defense of education prophetic of the present coming together of the better souls of both sections. I remember the story told me in a city of Texas, that one night at a public meeting held for the consideration of the imperative educational needs of the town, when nobody seemed to know the way out of the tangle, a quiet stranger from the audience came to the platform, asked permision to speak, and, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, said: "I am Dr. Sears, agent of the Peabody educational fund. I have heard your debates and appreciate your situation. I will give you as much as you will raise to establish your new common schools." The same brief message established the common school at almost every educational center in these States. In a journeying of twelve years through all the Southland, I have heard only blessings for the memory of this great and good man and unstinted praise of the wisdom of this fund. No other two millions of dollars invested in education have wrought such wide spread beneficence as this.

Dr. Eben Stearns, a veteran of normal school and academical instruction in the North, was spared for the last and best years of his life to organize the Peabody Normal School at Nashville, Tenn., which under the administration of his devoted successor, Chancellor William H. Payne, of Michigan, is growing into the preparation for the final endowment which will probably make it the first real normal university of the Union.

The later administration of Dr. J. L. M. Curry, of Alabama, most thoroughly furnished and most courageous of all advocates of universal education in the South, who, after thirty years of brilliant service as

member of the National and Confederate Congresses, professor, clergyman, minister of the United States to Spain, and author, has finally returned to the agency of the Peabody and assumed the additional control of the Slater educational fund, has only broadened and deepened the obligation of the South and spread abroad, through all lands, the admiration for the wisdom of this model educational trust. It only remains that the new industrial South, the sound and splendor of whose rising importance are filling the Nation and arresting the attention of the world, should, through a group of its new wealthy men, build the southern monument to this group of heroes, in the shape of an addition of $10,000,000 to the Peabody educational fund.

LXXXIV.

It was at the close of this the first effort of the Southern people to establish their own system of public instruction, in accordance with their own estimate of financial ability, only four years after South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida had come into the management of their own political affairs, that my first visit to Virginia, already referred to, took place. In that most eventful month of my educational experience I spent three weeks in attendance on the State institute for white teachers at the University of Virginia, in Albemarle County. The fourth week was given to the institute for colored teachers, at Lynchburg. Here, for the first time, I was introduced to a gathering of several hundred young people of this race, already engaged in teaching in the common schools of the State, who had come, often at great sacrifice, to meet Dr. Ruffner and his corps of instructors. One resolute group of these young men had walked 100 miles through the stifling heat of August to be present. The most effective teachers of the school were the brothers Montgomery, two young men, born in freedom, taken in childhood from New Orleans, educated by a friend of my own boyhood in Vermont, now supervisors of the excellent public schools for colored youth in Washington. That visit to Virginia in August, 1880, struck the keynote of the ministry of education which has engrossed my entire attention during the past twelve years, leading me through every Southern State, to every important educational center, with a wide opportunity for observation of every description of educational establishment or arrangement, in contact with the foremost educators and representatives of the educational public in these sixteen States.

It is because of this unusual opportunity for personal acquaintance with the whole field of Southern education during the past twelve years that this circular of information is so largely a record of personal experience. These years, from 1880 to 1892, cover what may be called the second period of the recent educational movement in the South, especially as concerns the establishment, by State and local effort, of its new public schools.