jurisdiction to make the people discontented and seditious. About the same time a minister of the gospel in Boston, Cotton Mather, was addressing these words to his congregation:

The more liberal education we bestow on our children, though we should pinch ourselves for it, and them, too, upon other accounts, the greater blessings are they likely to become, not only unto ourselves while we live, but also unto the Commonwealth when we shall be dead and gone.

Here we have the Cavalier and the Puritan, the aristocrat and the democrat, the champion of class and the representative of the people. The masses might slide for all of the Cavalier. There was a sense, however, in the thought of the Puritan, in which the humblest of the masses might rank with kings. Two educational policies could not be wider apart in their inception or their results, or fraught with mightier consequences. A germ, a seed, in the realm of civilization, as in the plant world or the animal, is a wonderful thing in its potency. If blighted or extinguished, as most germs are, that is the end of it, of course; but if it develops, one cannot, indeed, foresee the greatness to which it may attain, or even that it will attain greatness at all. One can only look back with astonishment to the humble and unpromising thing from which the greatness has sprung.

Now the Puritan migration to our shores between 1630 and 1640 brought us some remarkable men, of deep convictions, out of joint with the ways of England and deemed dangerous there, -strong men, I say, for be assured it was not dullards and nobodies whom they silenced there and drove to our inhospitable shores. They came to us in large numbers, artisans, merchants, clergymen, graduates of Cambridge University, and of Oxford not a few, the very bone and sinew of England,ambitious, thinking, determined men, with high ideas; and one of these ideas was the education of the people, in the narrow sense in which the idea was then conceived. This idea laid its grip upon the Puritan; it sent its roots into his soul, his practice. and his purposes; it grew apace; it responded to the changing times; it rose above itself; it has dominated New England

throughout its history; and to-day it is the grandest single interest of the Commonwealth. To quote the eloquent words of His Excellency the Governor, in his recent inaugural address, "education lays its imperial tax upon the treasury with an autocratic power readily acknowledged and obeyed by the intelligence and conscience of the people."

There has been an evolution in education as in everything else. We see the earmarks of old England in the schools of the Colonists, and the earmarks of the Colonists are distinctly visible to the curious investigator in the schools of to-day.

Take, for instance, early school architecture in New England. It was not original with the early settlers. Some of them had attended the great schools of England,- Rugby, Eton, Harrow, Westminster, and they got there the ideas which they reproduced in rude miniature in the new world. Now what was the English schoolroom? It was long, high and narrow. The floor rose by steps at the sides and ends from a spacious area, and on these were the benches, the wooden benches,—plain, hard, backbreaking as any you ever sat on. The windows were high up and out of reach. Between them and the floor was the wooden wainscot where the English boys wrote, cut and printed their names, a species of vandalism from which time often removed the stigma, since the name for whose writing the young rogue may have merited a flogging was likely to become a thing of secret, if not of open, pride to the school authorities when it became famous. Now the old New England schoolhouse often repeated the English interior, only in a small and rude way, the same raised platforms, the same plank seats, the same wooden wainscot, and the same windows high above it; and everything about it, too, was usually whittled and cut in the ruthless English way. In the little room the master's desk often loomed up like a pulpit. Just why so exalted a throne was reared in a room often not much larger than a dry goods box it would be hard to guess, if one did not look into an ancient English schoolroom and see there its undoubted prototype. And so in a score of things pertaining to our old schoolhouses the dominating influence of the mother country is seen.

Consider, next, the teachers of our early schools. They were men exclusively, just as in the old country. To be sure, there were a few dame schools, but they were private and for little children. Women did not figure in the educational schemes of our forefathers either as pupils or as teachers. Indeed, it was not long ago that it was thought akin to insanity for her to aspire to a high institution of learning or for a high institution of learning to give her a chance to do so. And farther back in colonial times it is a matter of history that it was provocative of lunacy for her to write or even to read books.

There is the distressing case of Mrs. Hopkins, wife of the Governor of Hartford on Connecticut. Governor Winthrop tells the pathetic story, in his History of New England from 1630 to 1649, how she was fallen into a sad infirmity-the loss of her reason-by giving herself to reading and writing books." Her husband saw his error when it was too late. "If she had attended to her household affairs," said the Governor," and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle with such things as are proper to men whose minds are stronger,”—I am only quoting,-"she had not lost her wits."

The first century of our public schools was a raw, glacial time, you see,--no girls among the students, no women among the teachers. Then came the second century, the era of the Alpine flowers fringing the glacier,-in which girls were taught in summer schools but not in winter, and then in winter schools after the boys were dismissed, while women were tried here and there as teachers in the hope that they might succeed, but in the fear that they would not. And now we are striking into the second half of the third century, with girls outnumbering the boys in our high schools, and young women rivalling young men in numbers and attainments in the colleges, while as teachers women are everywhere in overwhelming force It may be that the pendulum has swung too far the other way,—that we are now having too much of a good thing, for we really need in the school, as in the family, the robust influence of man as well as the refining influence of woman.

If in

Three centuries of evolution, therefore, in respect to the employment of women in the schools, the first of woman ignored, the second of woman timidly and sparingly recognized, the third of woman dominant and triumphant. this overturn she can remain truly and sweetly woman, far removed from that devitalized type of the abnormally intellectual woman that we sometimes see pictured in society papers as hailing from Boston, the revolution will carry with it its own justification.

Again, there has been an interesting evolution in the matter of discipline. Our fathers believed in the efficacy of bodily punishment. To-day we look upon a child's will as a weak, immature thing that needs to be strengthened; in the psychology of our fathers it was a stubborn thing that needed to be broken. Moreover, old-time school boys were all theoretically depraved and some of them naturally. All this needed the rod, that "ordinance of God," as the Dorchester colonists used to call it. If it did not stop wrong and reform the wrong-doer, it was not applied vigorously enough. I speak of the rod as symbolizing innumerable instruments and methods of punishment. These methods came from England, but, in spite of their harshness, they had lost barbarism in the transfer.

Think for a moment of that dreadful catalogue of capital offences that sullied the fame of England during the reigns of the three Georges. "It is a melancholy fact," wrote Blackstone, "that among the variety of actions men are daily liable to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty have been declared by Act of Parliament to be worthy of instant death." In the Colony of Massachusetts Bay there were only twenty capital offences, and in Plymouth Colony only eight. If these data do not sufficiently illustrate the trend among the Colonists to greater moderation, let me cite the common law of England that allowed, and still allows, if I am not misinformed, a man to chastise his wife,-moderately, indeed, but still to chastise her. Now the Colonists forbade this mode of family discipline, and I

will say in passing that when they forbade it the American ideal. of woman began to take shape.

But why this allusion to punishment of crime in the Old World and the New? Simply because punishment in the schoolroom sympathized with the spirit of punishment that pervaded the laws and was in the very air of the times. The harshness of the Colonists in the schoolroom was gentleness itself as compared with the harshness of England. Nor is it necessary to cite Dotheboys Hall, with its tragedy of poor Smike and old Squeers, or any other Yorkshire school, to prove this, for the flogging block was common in the great schools of England, and not unknown even in her universities. It was ruthlessly used, for instance, by that famous master of the Blue Coat School of London, a clergyman, under whom Coleridge, Lamb and DeQuincy were pupils, and of whom DeQuincy said : "The man fairly knouted his way from bloody youth up to truculent old age." And when Coleridge heard of his death, he exclaimed, "Lucky that the cherubim who took him to heaven were only faces and wings, or he would infallibly have flogged them by the way."

There has been a gratifying softening in this matter of discipline in both countries since 1644, in which we have led the way. Moral power is found to be more effective than the rod after all. Frail women in Dedham, and elsewhere throughout the State, are ruling in a superb way, by sheer force of character, great boys who, under the old regime, would have turned half their masters out of doors, or, at least, would have been willing to do so.

An English writer1 who recently visited our schools in order to get points that might be of service at home, says :-" The discipline of American schools, both elementary and secondary, cannot be too highly approved. It is the more admirable, as it seems to be entirely a matter for the pupils." After contrasting it with the discipline of even the good schools of England, to the greater credit of American schools, the writer adds that

Burstall, "The Education of Girls in the United States," Macmillan & Co.