to the foremost society of the region. For the past ten years the most eminent educators of the North, men like Harris, Soldan, Dickinson, Parker, Dunton, Walton, Hancock, Newell, and scores of women of corresponding reputation, have made their annual summer pilgrim. age to the South to superintend the State and local institutes, that, by the encouragement of the Peabody Education Fund, have been held in every State, for teachers of both races. These visiting experts uniformly return enthusiastic in their praise of the fine spirit and hard work, often reaching the pitch of consecration, with which they have been greeted. No school of pedagogy in the country reaches so broad a field and exerts an influence so radical as the Peabody Normal School at Nashville, in which 114 students, elected by competitive examination from ten States, are trained, for two years, partly at the expense of the Peabody Education Fund, with another division of 245 largely from the State of Tennessee. Every Southern State has established its normal schools for teachers of both races, or is on the eve of doing the same.

But the most powerful influence for good in the Southern common school is the great desire for learning among a large number of its pupils and the enthusiasm and devotion of a growing number of its teachers. Our Northern people have been told this by their own teachers working in the great schools for colored youth, and the pathetic story of the labors and sacrifices of these young pupils and their families has drawn both tears and liberal checks from thousands of churches through the length and breadth of the Northland. But too often the other side of the story, when rightly viewed even more inspiring, has either been left out, "damued with faint praise," or systematically misrepresented the story of the upbuilding of the new Southern common school, so far almost at the expense and by the persistent efforts of the class overwhelmed with ruin in the great civil

war.

XCIV.

The historian of the Republic in the near future will fill his broadest page with illuminated type to record the fact that in the closing decade of the first generation after the war this people, as the first offering of its reviving prosperity, expended $216,000,000 in the support of their new free common schools, $50,000,000 of which were given for the first experiment in human history in the universal education of 5,000,000 of slaves, emancipated by a military chief, without compensation, involving the absolute destruction of the only industrial system ever known in fifteen American commonwealths.

And it should be remembered by the fastidious educational expert that, after all has been said in praise of the natural methods of instruction, the South during the past twenty years, at the best, has only "kept school" according to the same ideas by which the North,

before 1860, was developed into that mighty industrial civilization that, in five years, trained the "Grand Army of the Republic" that saved the Union and launched the reconstructed United States on its present career of unexampled national prosperity. The bottom educational factor in this country is an American boy or girl, inspired with the hopes and ambitions of republican society, with a boundless horizon in front, working for the education, more or less, that will become the tools of manhood or womanhood, the one element so persistently ignored by a large class of our educational critics in their unfavorable contrast between the school training of the United States and Continental Europe. The knowledge gained in a school, whether primary or university, is valuable in proportion as it is fused, absorbed, incorporated into the lifeblood by a strong motive power in the scholar. The poorest old-fashioned Yankee gristmill, with a swift mountain stream behind it, will grind more grain than the splendid group of flouring palaces of Minneapolis in a drought with no reinforcement from steam. In thousands of crude country schools, ex-tempore academies, and "shingle palaces" with the sign "college" above the front door, the children of the sixteen great Northern States east of the Mississippi were educated into the generation that, in saving the American Union, did more for the uplift of mankind than all the universities of Europe for the last century. To-day the best thing that can be said for Southern education is that it is "fighting it out on that line," with the advantage of national sympathy, experience, and "material aid," and the near prospect of an industrial prosperity which will enable it in time to develop every realm of instruction according to the best modern ideals.

The one thing that everywhere forces itself upon my attention, in passing through these Southern schools of every grade, is that I am again living over the educational life of the New England of fifty years ago. The same crowd of brave boys, with their lively sisters, pretty cousins, and youngish maiden aunts, are pushing on, through the same difficulties, to the same end, as in the old district schools of Franklin County, Mass., New Salem and Deerfield academies, and the Amherst, Williams, Mount Holyoke, and Harvard of half a century ago. There is no general educational stagnation in these sixteen Southern States. Through them all pours a steady onflowing tide, bearing 6,000,000 of young Americans and all belonging thereto towards the "good time coming." As in the Father of Waters there are eddies, bayous, great inland lakes, marshes, snags, and sandbars, and periodical overflows that threaten to bury civilization under a new deluge; but in spite of all these things the mighty torrent pours on, always flowing the same way, towards the open sea,-thus, while there is sore need of improvement in every good way, a loud call for more money, better teachers, more effective methods of school-keeping, longer terms, more years in school, and especially more children brought on the school grounds

and more and better schoolhouses to contain them, yet below all this the great river flows on, pouring from the hills of the Lord toward the boundless ocean. The 20,000,000 of the Southland are afloat on its irresistible tide. And, while all sorts of discussion are going on, in regard to schooling, in general-the training of different classes and races, the limit of the common and the rights of the private and denominational school, the character of schoolbooks, all of which is duly reported to the country by the critical schoolman of the average type, whom we "ever have with us;"-yet all this is a grand debate on the deck of a craft steadily borne onward by an inland sea that no man can resist, and even the great Republic has, so far, been powerless to And even while the eager disputants are wrangling over the present critical situation, the man on the outlook calls a new landing, and the old situation is forever left behind.

This is the "conclusion of the whole matter," as I see it. There is no excuse for magnifying the results already gained, especially in the interest of a general upbuilding, which is more dependent on the progress of true education than upon all things else. Much less is there excuse for that most unscientific and useless criticism which leaves out of the account the motive power of American institutions propelled by the irresistible forces of our new American life. Nowhere is that motive power more evident than in the new educational movement of the New South; and all prophets of despair, wherever they may prophesy, will be left behind, stranded each on the little sand-bar of his own pessimistic "fad," while the children of the South will move onward to their own place in the glorious confederation of American life.

XCV.

It has been my intention through the investigations of the past twelve years to do ample justice to all the positive successes achieved in the Southern common school. But below this, of far greater interest, class of more significant facts at once attracted my attention.

The first and most radical of all was the fact itself of this effort of the Southern people to establish the American common school for "all sorts and conditions" of its population. Here was the decisive "new departure," which more than all things else struck the keynote of the New South. The Old South, or the Southern confederacy, if successful, could have achieved many of the results now loosely ascribed to the new order of affairs. It could have attracted a large and superior population from classes sympathetic with its social order in our own or foreign countries. It could have developed manufactures; flourished in literature and art; rebuilt and enlarged its old system of education; grown in wealth; given new proofs of the charm of its social life, and made new demonstration of splendid military and political ability-all the outcome of a republicanized aristocracy, the flower of the classic ideal of the Republic.

But the pivotal point amid the confusion of the past generation is the establishment in this section of the Republic of the American common school for the whole people. It is not established according to the European fashion, an elaborate system of class education, nowhere quite free, controlled by a central government to train the different strata of subjects each for its own place in the empire. It is everywhere the American system, proceeding from the people, supported by taxation imposed upon the people by themselves, supervised by officials. elected by and responsible to the people, open through all its departments to the humblest, free to all who come, proceeding on the idea that nothing in this world is too good for the common training of American children and youth for their common life on the windy uplands of American citizenship. I saw at once that this step was not taken by the educational public, that from 1870 has laid out the road for the children and youth, under any misapprehension. It was taken deliberately, once for all, and during the past twenty years, although at times the column has wavered and the usual number have fallen by the way, deserted or gone over to the enemy, yet in no State has there been more than a delay on the march, never a permanent check or an enforced retreat.

It was a most interesting study to learn who was responsible for this radical new departure. Not the North, save by example; for the Northern common-school system had been for generations a political scarecrow in the South, and the attempt to force it upon these States in the reconstruction period had bred disaffection and resistance almost like the breaking forth of a new conflict. Not the nation; for the support of this educational experiment by the National Government had seemed an intolerable grievance. If I looked at any entire class, even of respectable people at home, I might decide that the system had been sprung upon these States and could not endure. If I considered the actual poverty of the masses, even of the old superior class, during this decade, 1870-80; their reluctance to taxation; the endless demands upon the community, and the perpetual wrangles and protests against this new imposition, I might be discouraged. All these things I saw. But underneath this surface current I was soon aware of the prodigious undertow of which all these demonstrations were only the signs; all, in one way or another, dependent thereon. The long suppressed desire of multitudes of the better sort of all classes and both races had at last found expression. The blind impulse of two centuries on the Atlantic coast, even more intensified in the new Southwest, liberated by the overturnings of a revolutionary epoch, had now become a force like one of the forces of nature, not to be resisted. A resolute and intelligent common-school public had been developed; nobody knew how; hardly conscious of itself; often unrecognized as a party; while the movement went on, diffused abroad, but always felt like a rock of resistance or, if provoked, like a devastating hurricane

of wrath at any serious organized attempt to abolish, restrain, or essentially change the character of the people's common school. The wiser politicians and real statesmen recognized the people's will through the subtle political sense that makes even the ablest and bestfurnished man a real statesman or politician, and took their stand upon this as the "corner stone not to be broken." The great debate in the Senate of the United States on national aid to education, in 1884, revealed to the country an educational ability and a recognition of the American idea of universal education among the Senators of these States that, for the first time, informed the Northern people of the imperative need and mighty longing of their Southern neighbors. Only five of the twenty-two Senators representing the eleven ex-Confederate States then voted against the Blair bill, and at least two of these were committed to the opposition of the free school for all classes of American children and youth. It was indeed a momentous and most hopeful revelation to all who had the eyes to see it; this planting of its feet by the new South on the hard pan of American republican civilization, in this indorsement, by every State, of the American common school; the one institution at which every enemy of the American Republic, at home or abroad, is driving to-day with all its might.

XCVI.

Second. Another most significant fact was, that in these common schools for the first time all classes of the dominant race of the South had been brought together with mutual recognition of each other's rightful claims and respect to the deliberate verdict of all in a great public concern. Doubtless the war period had greatly strengthened this feeling by the sharp experiences of military life and the sympathies awakened by the mutual endurance of a great public calamity involving a whole people in a common ruin. The isolated and sharply divided character of the old Southern life bore its fruit of a division of the white population into obstinate cliques, classes, and religious parties, with the inevitable friction and misunderstanding of this order of society. But here in the new common school for the first time the children of the men who had fought and the women who had suffered together during the terrible years of conflict were brought together for a common interest. The result was not only an uplift of the lower orders, but a great awakening in the superior class of honest pride in a popu lation hitherto not fairly understood. The neighborhood jealousies left by an unsuccessful and ruinous war were thus overcome by mutual labors and sacrifices in the most reconciling of all works, the "working together for good" of the children. The clergy learned to appreciate the prodigious force of moral instruction by the whole people in a people's school established not only for instruction in the elements of knowledge, but mainly for the training of that worthy manhood and