time and the salary of the officer advanced to five thousand dollars, while the Commissioner of this office, representing education at the national capital, can receive only three thousand dollars, and can have only about fifty thousand dollars a year to spend on his clerical force? It is time, gentlemen, it is high time that there was action, emphasized action, until the results are secured. Money is not only needed to pay service, but to give room for service in this country where land is so cheap and properties are so obtainable. Look at the history of the treatment of that office with reference to space. When I first went into that office we had two rooms; and then we were driven out of that building into another, and another, and back to where the office is at present, and then not allowed all of that small building. Go there to-day and see how the museum is crowded out of place, and the books of the library have to be put in rooms where work is going on all the time. Shall it be said that there is not interest enough in education in the United States to furnish that office a proper home, a proper working place and proper means?

MR. SCOFIELD: We have appointed a good committee to memorialize Congress, but it won't get much further unless every man in every section of the country shall put his shoulder to the wheel. In New York we adopted this plan in some of our Congressional districts. I happened to be the man in our district, and it is my business whenever any educational matter comes before Congress, to at once prepare and send to every educational man in that Congressional district, for his signature, a memorial to our member of Congress. We can accomplish anything we like almost, in the way of advancing the work in the department of the Bureau of Education, if we only set about it. I believe the educator can mould public opinion as no other man in the vicinity can mould it, if he only knows how to do it. And I hope the men in this country will keep posted on what is before Congress, and will earnestly set about it, and put a sustaining hand under the Commissioner and furnish the means.

MR. PARR: I want to add just a word in emphasis to what has been said, with this added thought,-that in place of going to these men as suppliants, we should stand squarely on our heels and demand as a right the action we desire. Teachers lack the courage to stand up and demand what they need. We have an educational text-book which is unpopular with the educational people of the State, and yet in the face of that fact there were but two men in the State to stand up and oppose a measure which was passing through our Legislature which we thought very detrimental to the educational interests of our State.

EDUCATION IN THE SOUTH.

BY HON W. R. GARRETT,

South-Western Journal of Education, Nashville, Tenn.

Mr. President: The condition of education in the South has for many years engaged the attention of the friends of education in all parts of the United States. Its history has received an impulse from the recent publications of the Commissioner of Education, in which Prof. Herbert B. Adams has directed attention to several prominent Southern colleges. The whole subject, whether viewed in its present condition or its past history, comes more immediately into notice on account of the location of the next meeting of the National Educational Association in a Southern city. In discussing education in the South from a Southern staud-point, I do not wish to appear as its eulogist, or its censor, or its partisan. I shall make no effort to present an array of statistics, or an exhaustive historical treatise. It is my purpose, rather, to sketch some of itscharacteristic features, to suggest some points in which it has differed from the education of any other section of the country, and to do all in my power to correct some impressions which seem to me to be erroneous, but which have gained currency both at home and abroad.

Some persons have discussed the subject from the stand-point of statistics, and have drawn from the tables of illiteracy hasty and illogical conclusions. No candid observer will deny or wish to disguise the facts of the United States Census, or the inferences legitimately drawn from them. The tables of illiteracy incontestably prove that the ratio of persons over ten years of age, exclusive of the colored population, who cannot read and write, is greater in the South than in any other section of the United States. These statistics certainly warrant the inference that, tried by its results, there have been grave defects in Southern education which have not existed in other sections of the Union. The finger of fact, however, does not point to the cause, and these statistics do not justify such inferences as the following:

As the ratio of those who cannot read and write in Massachusetts is to the ratio who cannot read and write in Virginia, so is education in Massachusetts to education in Virginia.

Education in the South has been neglected, teachers have been incompetent, the colleges and higher institutions have been imperfect and inadequate, the academies and preparatory schools have been insufficient, very little money has been expended, and the whole population is indifferent to education and largely illiterate.

Again:

The history of early American literature plainly shows the dearth of Southern production in the departments of history, poetry, fiction, and what may be called the current or lighter literature.

This fact can not be denied. Without stopping to engage in a metaphysical discussion as to whether this is due to the lack of genius, or to the direction of genius into different or higher channels, on the principle of Metternich, that those who make history do not write history, or as to whether it indicates the lack of the literary or the commercial element of book-making, I deem it sufficient to my purpose to point out the fact that no statistics warrant the assumption that the dearth of Southern production in the enumerated fields of literature proves the inadequacy of Southern education.

On the other hand, writers of ability have shown by computations, almost statistical, since the exact statistics of early Southern education cannot be reached, that the Southern States have, in the past, in proportion to population and resources, spent as much money for educa tion as any other section of the country; that they have always maintained universities, colleges, and institutions of high grade, and an adequate number of academies and preparatory schools; that the work of these institutions and the attendance of pupils have been fully equal to that in other sections of the Union. From these facts, which, I think, cannot be successfully denied, conclusions have been drawn in favor of Southern education, some of which are misleading. It is needless to pursue the enumeration of these apparently conflicting views. Can they all be true? Perhaps not; but to a certain extent, I think, they can be reconciled.

The South did, indeed, make a grave educational mistake, but not the mistake so frequently attributed to it. This mistake limited the usefulness of education in the past, embarrasses its efficiency at the present, and presents to those who wish to investigate its former work only meagre statistics and scraps of history. This mistake can, perhaps, be best pointed out by contrasting the educational systems of the three sections of our country which are geographically distinct from each other, the North-East, the West, and the South. In making this sketch, I shall introduce copious extracts from an address which I had the honor to deliver, August 5, 1885, before the Tennessee State Teachers' Association, on The History of Teachers' Institutes in Tennessee, I shall offer no apology for this, because I believe that those who hear me will listen with more interest to words spoken among Southern educators in family council than to language carefully weighed for general circulation.

The first institution of learning in the United States was Harvard University, founded by an enactment of the General Court of Massachusetts, in 1636, just two hundred years before the development of her public school system under Horace Mann.

William and Mary College, in Virginia, was projected in 1619, began

its corporate existence in 1660, but was not in actual operation until 1692. Other colleges and universities were established. Whoever takes the trouble to investigate the early history of education in this country will be struck with the fact that the attention of our forefathers was directed, in the first place, to the higher education. The college preceded the school, extending its influence downwards. In the North-Eastern States, beginning as early as 1642 in Massachusetts, common school education was stimulated by enactments of exhortation, by statutory suggestions, and by legislation directory to local authorities. In the South, it was left solely to accident and private enterprise, and was ignored in legislation until 1777. In our colonial period, organized systems of common school education were nowhere to be found. Exclusively in the South, and to a great extent in the whole country, education was built from the top. Is it wonderful if its foundation was defective? New England was the first to discover the mistake. Early in its history, Massachusetts began the reform, but it took many years to reach complete results.

New England may thus be regarded as the prototype of common school education in America. Her common schools were the first to be woven into comprehensive and efficient public system. To her must be accorded all the honors which belong to the pioneer who marks out the road. To her still cling some of the faults which inhere in all prototypes, embedded and crystallized in early formation.

In the North-East were first tested the appliances brought to bear by the State for developing education into a science. Here the centrifugal tendencies of the old systems were first corrected. The teacher was taken from the school-room, where he had so long worked alone, apart from his co-laborers, and was thrown into contact with the educational world. The four parties to education were thus brought together, the teacher, the pupil, the parent, and the public. Friendly supervision by State and county officers, gathering statistics, diffusing information; the normal school, for the systematic training of teachers; the popular institute, where all the parties of education meet on a common level; all these beneficent appliances soon began to reflect into each schoolroom the combined experience of all the educators of the country; and better still, the strong common sense of the American people was thrown into the school-room in a current as refreshing and as purifying as a stream of fresh air into an overheated atmosphere.

The schools of such a system must, inevitably, soon surpass the schools of a system where no such appliances are used; not from any superiority of learning or ability in the individual teacher, but from the community of thought and the unity of action. Improved methods are disseminated, school wants are understood by teachers and the public, superior appliances are provided, schools are more equally diffused; in short, education flourishes through the only means by which anything can reach complete development in this country, the public sympathy.

Although similar systems existed in some other portions of the country, yet the system of New England was the first to develop into vigor. Such a system could not long be left to one corner. It is now the sys tem of the United States.

Education in the West was not left to evolve its slow growth from its own conditions, hindered by early errors. It sprung into existence in the full blaze of the nineteenth century, and used the dear-bought experience of others. The sagacious statesman, Thomas Jefferson, who contributed more than any other person to make possible the development of the West, was defeated in his native State in one of the dearest wishes of his heart. He was one of the few men in the South who grasped the idea of a public system of instruction. When his most strenuous exertions failed to engraft such a system on the laws of Virginia, he was compelled to be content with founding a great university. Yet, so much delighted was Jefferson with this much of victory, that he caused to be engraved on his tomb, "Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, and of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia”—a fitting epitaph, which tells us that the same hand which penned the declaration of human rights, points to education as the means to preserve them forever.

When Virginia was induced, largely through his influence, on December 30, 1780, to make the great Christmas gift by which she ceded the North-West Territory, Jefferson, who was in Congress in 1784, when this cession was accepted, became chairman of the committee to prepare a plan for the organization of the Territory, and laid the foundations of the American policy of territorial government. When Louisiana was added to the United States, that joint monument to the genius of Jefferson and Napoleon, the only handwriting of Napoleon now left on the map of the world, the same system was extended to the new Territory, and afterwards to all the other Territories.

As the great West began to be peopled, an educational advantage was enjoyed which no other portion of the Union had felt. Each State received as a birthday present from the United States a magnificent donation for education. The system was built from the bottom. No top-heavy branches, no crystallized strata impeded its growth.

The common school followed close on the heels of the pioneer, and expanded into higher education in direct response to popular demand. The New England methods and systems grew and widened in the virgin soil, and the education of the West, although the youngest, is to-day the most robust and healthy plant in America.

What has been said in reference to the other sections may be sufficient to indicate the great mistake of the South. It was not the mistake of indifference, or ignorance, or inertness. It was the mistake of methods and systems. It was the error of prejudice, inhering in their old English blood, and confidence in their time-honored English insti