defects of the Northern district school come from the sharp contrast between the great educational progress in cities and villages and the slower movement in the open country, also from the constantly stimulated ideal of common-school instruction, which bids fair to provoke a reaction in the educational public.

The city and an increasing number of the graded village schools of the South are organized, disciplined, and, in many cases, taught, by the prevailing methods of "the new education." Their superintendents, often men of large ability and admirable zeal, with an increasing number of their teachers, are laboring earnestly to keep themselves in elbow touch and hearty sympathy with their professional friends in other portions of the country. But, outside certain favored districts and occasional schools, the entire country-school system of the South is in no condition to institute a fair comparison with that of any Northern State, either in the ability of the people for its support, the character of its school buildings, the quality of its teachers and the facilities for instruction, the length of its term and regularity of attendance, the number of years given to school life, the social and educational environment, the facilities for reading, the character of the occupations of the children out of school, and the home life of multitudes of the humbler classes. A good country district school in Massachusetts or Indiana is the outgrowth of the entire history and civilization of the locality and the Commonwealth, the spiritual thermometer which, better than any other test, reveals the status of that neighborhood and its relation to the present condition of Christendom. The three or four months' white or colored Southern country school, especially in the vast lowland regions where illiteracy most prevails, even if the best that the people can afford, established and supported with a zeal and sacrifice often pathetic and worthy of all admiration, is another sort of institution, of which the best that can be said is that its intelligent friends are "forgetting the things that are behind and pressing forward to the things that are before." Many of the village graded schools are in the midst of a desperate struggle out of the jungle of embarrassments and difficulties in which they were born and cradled into the "cleared land" where education can "have free course, run, and be glorified." And more than one of the larger Southern cities is, to-day, in the hands of the vilest of all rings, an educational political clique, with only hope from the political dynamite that will blow open the eyes of the people to the rights of the children.

XC.

All this is no special disparagement to Southern schoolkeeping. The common school everywhere is a slow growth and, like the child, is destined to pass through the whole circle of childrens' diseases before it finds itself on a pair of legs strong and swift enough to run the race.

First comes the effort of the sectarian churches to capture the new school, pack it with their own members as teachers, and use it as a proselyting machine. Next the local politicians jump upon it and endeavor to make it a tender to the political engine. Then comes in the insidious and all-pervading social influence in which every little group of families endeavors to get possession of the reins, adjust the whole arrangement to their own notious, and, through their own sisters, cousins, and aunts, as teachers, virtually educate the town. Not less mischievous is the reign of pedantry; when a narrow schoolman at the head of the system switches off a public school upon the side track of a petty, fruitless, and obstinate effort to change it to an imitation college or academy of the old-time sort. Besides these, there are morbid tendencies innumerable-as numerous and as mischievous as the enemies that fight the life of a child from the cradle to manhood-that keep the public school in "a state of siege ;" so that only by the eternal vigilance of an intelligent and resolute educational public can it be kept to its own work till safely landed in that central position where every class can be relied upon to become its defender in any hour of peril.

The common school has fought its way up to its present vantage ground of power in every Northern State through generations of conflict. Even yet it is "under arms" against the assault of its eclesiastical and political foes, often in combination, that would change the American to the European and Canadian type of public education. So powerful are these influences that there are not a score of cities of 100,000 people in the North where the people are able to command the services of an educator of the first class as superintendent of schools; and even the important office of State commissioner of education too often comes in at the end of a political "deal," bestowed with no good will to the children. It is not, then, remarkable that the Southern common school, not yet a generation old, born and cradled in a revolutionary epoch, environed with peculiar and obstinate difficulties of its own, should be still beset almost to the death by all these hostile influences, often in their most aggravated form. That such is the case is, however, the hard fact that must modify the estimate and reveal the absurdity of the prodigious praise of its reckless and boastful "boomers," North and South. That it has survived and, at the end of twenty years, come out victor in this "holy war" is another stubborn fact that challenges the admiration and demands the sympathy of the true educational public at home and abroad.

XCI.

These words of caution are especially in order in view of a twofold style of misapprehension of the present condition of Southern publicschool affairs, which not only affects the proper judgment through the North, but is in great danger of confusing the educational public at home.

The first is the inevitable American habit of inordinate exaggeration and a boastfulness that borders on insolence in pushing the claims of any portion of the country to public consideration. There is just now a real danger that the Northern educational public will be filled with a thoroughly misleading notion of the real status of the Southern common school. The more reliable educators, the real statesmen, and the genuine educational public of that section are not responsible for this exaggeration. In the South it is the work largely of the local press and the great army of all sorts which in every community makes a religion of the indiscriminate laudation of its own locality, its people and institutions, its essential superiority to every other people and society at home or abroad. But an especial cause of this tendency is found in the highly colored representation of the numerous companies of influential persons engaged in the industrial development of the mining, manufacturing, transportation, and immigration interests of these States. More than one of these State official departments is publishing to the world, as an attraction to "respectable immigration" to the South, a thoroughly unreliable account of the common-school facilities of vast regions of country, doubtless with advantages of a sort, but so poorly supplied with educational furnishings that their own "respectable people" are steadily emigrating to the towns and cities, largely to the Northwest, in search of the same advantages. The Northern press is largely in the hands of the vast combinations of capital that are moving upon the South in an industrial invasion second only in power to the armed host of a generation ago, and easily lends itself to the highly-colored publication of anything that will move an emigrating army in its train.

XCII.

These influences are not peculiar to Southern life, and their exaggerations are easily understood by the more intelligent portion of the people everywhere. But within the past five years there has been a special and systematic misrepresentation of Southern educational affairs, originating in the peculiar combination of hostile forces which has temporarily defeated the movement for national aid to education in Congress. The most effective instrumentality employed by this combination has been the systematic falsification, misrepresentation, and misreading of the facts relating to the educational status of the South by an influential section of the Northern metropolitan press. By a dishonest manipulation of statistics, the skillful casting of false lights, exaggerating the positive and suppressing the negative side of educational progress, wilfully misinterpreting the just and natural praise of the best-informed educators and bringing to the front the absurd overstatements of people of no local reputation for educational ability; by persistent malignant assaults upon the foremost friends of national aid in the North, and the studied concealment of its almost universal in

dorsement by the weight of educational opinion in the South; by adroit playing upon sectional, political, and ecclesiastical prejudices, the leading press of the Northern cities has been made the vehicle to dissemi. nate a view of the progress, prospects, and general efficiency of the common school that fills its best-informed friends everywhere with amazement and indignation. As a result, the scheme for national aid was finally defeated in the Senate by New England senatorial votes, cast under a thorough misapprehension of the present condition of Southern education, the necessities of the masses of Southern children, and the improbability of any effectual change that will meet the demands of the present generation.

A moment's examination even of the tables appended to this circular will demonstrate the absurdity of this wholesale misrepresentation. There are to-day not less than 6,000,000 children and youth in the sixteen Southern States in imperative need of a good elementary education, only possible from several years attendance on a good school, at least six months in a year. Of these some four and one-fourth millions are represented by the vague educational mirage denominated "enrollment." Some two-thirds of this drifting multitude are reported in "average daily attendance" in schools kept from eighty-eight to ninetyfive days in the year. Fifteen Southern States and the District of Columbia will pay this year less than $25,000,000 for common schools for all these children, not three times as much as the State of Massachusetts for her 400,000; only one-third more than the State of New York for her 650,000 school children. From the most reliable estimates of the National Bureau of Education the South Atlantic and South Central Division, including fifteen Southern States and the District of Columbia, had in 1888, respectively, 57.25 and 54.08 per cent of their population from 6 to 14 in common schools of this short annual duration, with all the chances of a brief term of school life. Meanwhile the North Atlantic and North Central Divisions had respectively 73.99 and 77.53 and even the new Western Division 66.93 per cent of the same age in average attendance on schools nearly twice as long in session each year, with a much larger habit of prolonged schooling. The two southern divisions are able to expend annually per capita, on this "average attendance," including little more than one-half the real school population, but $7.80 and $6.93, while the North Atlantic, North Central, and Western Divisions expend, respectively, $21.67, $19.37, and $29.99 on an "average attendance," nearly twice as large as the South. The result is that the North Atlantic Division, including the six New England States, with New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, the most wealthy and cultivated portion of the Union, schools 73.99 per cent of its population between 6 and 14 by an expenditure of 4.04 mills per dollar on its assessed valuation. Meanwhile the South Atlantic Division, the original portion of the Union that helped win national independence and establish the Republic and give to its earlier years the great company of statesmen grouped

about Washington, without national aid, which has been poured like a river through the whole Republic west of the Alleghenies, is to-day expending 4.03 mills per dollar on its valuation, only 1 mill per dollar less than the rich and powerful Northeast, to educate 57.25 per cent, little more than half its children between 6 and 14, from 88 to 95 days in the year.

This brief statement of "figures that don't lie" casts an electric light upon the delusion whereby five Senators from Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut-States where 99.99, 69.90, and 76.42 of each 100 children are in daily average attendance on schools of longer duration and better quality, with greatly superior facilities for private school instruction—were persuaded to defeat the national educational bill in the Senate on the plea that, in the words of the great popular scientific journal of the country, "The South is doing very well now." This plain statement of facts dissolves the whole realm of cloudland and sectional fog in which the Northern educational public has been set adrift during the past five years, piloted by the "cultivated" leadership of metropolitan journalism, in humble imitation of the present attitude of upper-class England, until the present year in Parliament, resisting to the death every movement to give an effective free school system to the

masses.

XCIII.

But, on the other hand, great injustice is done to the Southern common school and the educational public responsible for it, by a class of critics who have insisted upon judging it by the severe test of the natural methods of schoolkeeping which only within the past twenty years have been heartily accepted in the most favored seats of popular education in the country. Even tried by this standard, before which the major half even of New England schoolkeeping would go to the wall, there is no excuse for the wholesale depreciation of the movement to which we have been treated by this class of hypercritical experts. Our northern Chautauquas, summer institutes, and normal and professional seminaries of all kinds are thronged with the young teachers, especially young women, from all these States. A rising flood of Southern visitors is pouring through the most celebrated schools of the great Northern cities, intent on the observation and capture of the best things. An increasing number of young men from Southern colleges is going abroad for advanced study, and were it not that so many of them, on their return, are caught up by Northern institutions, the whole region of Southern education would be more largely refreshed thereby than at present. But, as it is, there is already a great deal going on in the graded schools of all the Southern States that need not fear comparison with anything done under similar conditions in the East or West. Especially are many of these schools rich in the quality of their women teachers, numbers of whom represent the best families and bring to their work the social culture and personal enthusiasm peculiar