tucky, was also one of the graduates of Union. President Tappan, the creator of the University of Michigan; President Hager, of the State Normal School at Salem, Mass.; William H. McGuffey, eminent as an educator and compiler of commonschool books in Virginia and Ohio; Dr. Griffin, president of Williams College, Massachusetts, and Jeremiah Day, president of Yale College, were also Union men.

Of the 4,850 students of Union College up to 1854, 885 were clergymen, 1,070 lawyers, 265 physicians, 225 teachers and professors, and 95 farmers. Two Presidents of the United States, Martin Van Buren and Chester A. Arthur, and scores of men in the higher public and industrial life were the pupils of this great school. Roger B. Taney, William L. Marcy, Governor Rice of Massachusetts, John V. L. Pryne, John H. Reynolds, Erastus Root, William Cassidy, Preston King, Amos Dean, John Van Buren, N. P. Tallmadge, Peter Gansevoort, T. Romyen Beck of New York, and Albert Barnes and Theodore Clapp, both clergymen of great public influence in the Middle and Southern States, were of the number. It is doubtful if any American college ever sent forth a larger number of influential men in public and professional life than Union during the sixty-two years' presidency of Dr. Nott. In Governor William H. Seward and in John C. Spencer, secretary of state and superintendent of schools, he gave to New York the most important agents in the organization of the present common school system of the Commonwealth.

EMMA WILLARD.

While the great work of Dr. Nott was going on at Union College, Schenectady, another enterprise, fraught with equally decisive results in the State of New York and the nation, was inaugurated at the new city of Troy, 20 miles to the east, on the opposite side of the Hudson from Albany. This was the establishment, in 1820, of the Troy Female Seminary, under the lead of Mrs. Emma Willard, with the cooperation of her husband, Dr. John Willard. Although but 5 miles from the capital, Troy was, in more than one respect, half a century away from its neighboring city of Albany. The latter was the center of the solid conservatism of the ancient Dutch régime; a rural capital city, where the active end of society revolved about the yearly meeting of the legislature and the residence of the State officials; a city that, until the advent of Dr. Nott and his new Presbyterian Church, had failed even to provide sufficiently for the schooling of the children of its superior families, to say nothing of its neglect, until 1850, of any substantial arrangement for the education of the masses of its people. It would have been impossible for Union College or the school of Mrs. Willard to have become the characteristic institutions they were if located at Albany, even as late as 1820. Dr. Nott wisely planted himself on the frontier of civilization, at Schenectady, as a point "out West." Mrs. Willard, after the usual discouraging experience with New York legislators of that period, left the little village of Waterford, where for two years she had supported a school, and accepted the offer of Troy to furnish a $5,000 schoolhouse with a public gift of $4,000 and private subscriptions, that in this new city, practically a New England colony on the Hudson, her great experiment might be tried for the higher education of American girls.

As in the case of Dr. Nott and so many of the educational agitators and actors of this period of educational transition in New York, Emma Hart was a New England girl, straight out of the center of Yankeedom. She was born at Berlin, Conn., in 1787, the year when Manassah Cutler, of Connecticut and Massachusetts, was manipulating the congress of the confederation in behalf of the magnificent gift of the national public lands to the New Northwest, which gave this empire beyond the Alleghanies the first great lift toward its proud elevation of public education, to-day its best claim to the admiration of the world. She was the sixteenth of her father's seventeen children, the youngest being Almira, afterwards Mrs. Lincoln Phelps, who, in her day and place, was the true "other half" of this pair of great

Connecticut girls. She came of good stock. Her mother, a second wife and the parent of ten of the seventeen children, was one of those devoted, thoughtful, persistent women who seem born to refresh the generations by the gift of great daughters and sons. While yet little children, Emma and an older sister were sent out every year, at the time of carding and sorting the wool of which the family clothing was made, to scatter the remnants for which there was no home use on the bushes that the birds might gather them up to build their nests-a beautiful prophecy of the big nest for the shelter and training of American girls built by Emma forty years later at Troy. Her father was one of that class of religionists who, even at that early day, revolted with all his heart and soul and strength from the terrible theology and ironclad bigotry of the old Puritan creed and social order. Being compelled, as an official act by his position in the church, to prosecute two men who refused to pay the regulation parish tax to support a church in which they did not believe, he did his duty-paid the tax himself, took the men out of jail, and "freed his conscience" by leaving the church, into which he could not be coaxed again until the day of his death. It was out of such a combination of deep religious mother faith and love for all God's creatures and the father's defiant courage in "forcing the fight" of dissent that the character of this most womanly of women, most courageous and capable of educational reformers, was all compact.

Her education until the age of 15 was obtained from her parents, with the aid of the ordinary district school of the day. After 15 she spent two years with Dr. Miner, where she studied hard to keep ahead of her examinations, even wrapping herself in a big overcoat and sitting on a horse block in her father's woodshed to study her lessons while the home resounded with the racket and roof-splitting fun of a young people's party within. At the age of 17 she was urged to open a school for young children in her native village. The forenoon of the first day was spent in the vain attempt to bring her crowd of incorrigible youngsters into any condition of obedience or attention to the orders of the young schoolmistress. At the noon recess she supplied herself with a bundle of stout rods and spent the whole afternoon in administering a sound thrashing to every member of the school. Afterwards that particular school understood that "order is Heaven's first law." At the close of the term her reputation as a teacher was established at home and "through the region 'round about."

From this experience she turned again to her own schooling, and spent two years at Hartford, Conn., in two of the best schools of the town, with tuition at "two and sixpence and board at 12 shillings a week." This was the end of her school life, although she remained a persistent student until the end of her life at the age of 83. She returned to teach the academy at Berlin, from which she was soon invited to attractive positions in three States. She lingered at the old academy at Westfield, Mass., a few months on her way to her final New England work at Middlebury, Vt. Here she established a school for girls which soon made itself felt in such fashion that the great dons of Middlebury College condescended to attend its examinations and commencements and warmly praised the young schoolmistress, with the qualification that "it would be altogether irregular for her and her girls to be seen on similar occasions at the college." But already this bright young maiden had "taken the measure" of the college itself, and asked herself the decisive question that nobody but a wise and brave woman can answer, Why can not the girls of America be admittted inside the iron gate through which their brothers pass into the enchanted land of the higher education?

Happily for her and the cause she so magnificently represented for half a century, she was now turned aside into the "green pastures and still waters" of a happy marriage, and for five years, until the age of 30, lived as the wife of Dr. John Willard, a physician by profession, then a high official of the State and an enthusiastic political follower of Thomas Jefferson, whose educational ideas he had also accepted. The loss of his political office and financial reverses were the guiding hand of Providence to lead the young wife back to her own great vocation as the

pioneer of a superior education for young women, especially of the great world beyond the Berkshire Hills. It would be an untold advantage if the "lady principal" of the American female seminary could always, like Emma Willard, come to her work with a personal knowledge of the common schools of the people and a teacher's experience in every grade of elementary and secondary school, crowned by a few years of a successful and happy marriage. The launching of thousands of young American girls, with only the experience of a few years spent as pupils in an exclusive female seminary, even ignorant of the common routine of home life, doubly oblivious of the nature and habits of children, not even aware there is such a science and art as pedagogics, into the most responsible posts of instruction, often the principalship of a large school for young women, is one of the least hopeful educational signs of the times. When, in 1814, at the age of 27, furnished with that experience of life which to such a woman includes the best in the highest schooling, Emma Willard stepped forward in the reestablishment of her model school at Middlebury, Vt., she knew just what she wanted to do. With the hearty cooperation of her husband, who managed the practical details of the enterprise, she succeeded in bringing 70 girls about her, and up in the highlands of Vermont began to draw to herself the daughters of the most influential people of the neighboring State of New York.

She early recognized the absolute importance, in every enterprise of education, of keeping herself and her cause before the people. She had no respect for the absurd attitude of exclusiveness and overstrained public reservo by which a class of schools for American girls seeks the patronage of the peculiar type of families whose ambition seems to be to educate their daughters "under glass." Emma Willard was a woman of the people, not in the vulgar sense of being an educational demagogue, appealing to the false pride and cheap ambition of the great crowd whose desire is to clutch the prize of high position and eminent success without the labor by which no real place in American society can be secured and retained. But she stepped forth at once as a superior woman, sure of her own position, knowing what she would do, claiming by her right as the representative of thousands of young American women to demand the approval and cooperation of the most influential men and women of the time. While yet at Middlebury she began that habit of correspondence with the most distinguished public men of the time which was so large an element in her future success. She wrote to President Monroe, Chancellor Kent, and other less celebrated but influential gentlemen in New York, unfolding her plans through her letters and a prospectus of a college for girls, carefully prepared by herself, and such as had not until that time been addressed to the educational public of the nation.

It may be remarked that this was seven years before the city of Boston had attempted to establish its free high school for girls, which after a brief existence was abolished and waited a generation for its resurrection. There were already a few schools for girls in New England, and fewer still in the Middle and Southern States, where the claims of a thorough and extended system of education were acknowledged. But these were generally of an exclusive type, accessible chiefly to the daughters of the educated and well-to-do families of the leading cities. Mary Lyon had not yet gone forth in Massachusetts on her great work of making the secondary education so cheap that the girls of the poorer class of farmers and mechanics could "work their way" up to an educational outfit for good service in the school and church. Mrs. Willard's eye was upon the whole country. She realized that New England could safely bo left to make its own way to the best results, while the great new world opening beyond the Hudson and the old States extending down the Atlantic Coast was the most inviting field in which to plant an institution of national proportions.

She first made a lodgment in Waterford, a suburban village of Albany and Troy, invited by a few families whose daughters had attended her Vermont school. Sho at once attracted the attention of Governor De Witt Clinton, the foremost public man that had yet appeared in the State government of New York, the obstinate and

intelligent friend of education in all its relations to a superior Commonwealth. By his approval, through his messages to the legislature and the assistance of a group of the foremost men then gathered about the capital, she obtained a charter for her school in Waterford, under the patronage, such as it was, of the board of regents, with the expectation of being admitted to the distribution of the small annual income of the literary fund. Her application for an appropriation and endowment by the State, similar to that by which Union College had been lifted from the obscurity of a small village academy to a position among the great colleges of the country, after two years of alternate hope and disappointment, fell to the ground, although backed by the great influence of the governor and other powerful friends.

Already the persistent opposition of the denominational academy and college, which has always been one of the serious drawbacks of popular education in the States beyond the Hudson, was felt in the influence that defeated the movement which would have made the Mary Willard Seminary the Vassar College of New York half a century before its establishment at Poughkeepsie. Convinced that she had mistaken the source of patronage and material aid in dealing with the legislature, and with a decided sense of disillusion in her enthusiastic and reverent estimate of the "fathers of the State," she turned in 1820 to the offer of the young and progressive city of Troy, then and for many years after one of the most energetic and intelligent of the new American towns. The city corporation raised $4,000 by tax. Another fund was raised by subscription. A brick building 60 by 40 feet, three stories above the basement, was erected in the very heart of the town. The building was rented to Dr. Willard by the city government, and in 1821 the beginning was made of the most celebrated school for girls that had been hitherto known in the New World, and according to eminent authorities no school of equal influence was then known in Europe.

Her model school was now a fact, housed in a spacious building in the heart of a progressive and friendly community, in the best possible situation to cover the entiro space of the old Atlantic and new Western school public. But this was only the material beginning of the new education that was to be the living soul of the institution. She showed her wisdom by discarding the name "college," under which so many inferior schools were already masquerading before a credulous public, and then and always was the "principal of the Troy Female Seminary." Her leading teachers were largely from the class of young women she had already educated, and her younger sister, now a young widow and an accomplished woman, for nine years was her alter ego in the practical work of the seminary. She decided at once that while the general education in a way more exhaustive and thorough than had hitherto been known was an important need of American girls as an outfit for home and social life, this could never be achieved until a superior race of women teachers was educated to take the places of the class of broken-down females, second-rate "masters," and inferior instructors who were established as the principals and managers of the regulation "female college." Her seminary at once became the great normal school for the training of young women for the office of teaching their own sex; the first great school that began and continued through its long and splendid carcer with this intention at its heart.

To accomplish this it was necessary that a system of student aid should be inaugurated, whereby a large class of superior young women, unable to incur the expense of $500 a year, could enjoy the opportunities of the institution. This she took in hand as her own vocation, and by a system of loans to her pupils, not half of which could ever be repaid, she expended $75,000 during the years of her principalship, one of the most reliable contributions to the education of woman that had been made at this period of American history.

Then came up the great necessity of the improvement of text-books suitable for the education of young women. She at once determined on a class of manuals higher than those used in the ordinary public schools, to make science, philosophy, and the structure and literature of the language a prominent feature in the curriculum. This

necessitated the making of suitable books of instruction. Her attention was first called to the study of geography, which had been only recently admitted into the course of study in any class of schools. Beginning with the fundamental proposition, "However well it may be for a man to have a good knowledge of geography, yet it is better for him to have a sound judgment and a well-established intellect," she called to her aid Mr. William C. Woodbridge, of Connecticut, the foremost practical American geographer of his day, and in 1821 published the first American geography that proposed the instruction of that science by appeal to the eye through maps and charts and the accumulation of material in portable shape to be carried in the memory. In this career, as the author of a series of schoolbooks, with several volumes of history and science, including the famous Temple of Fame, a valuable chart of universal history, she persisted during her life. Her text-books at the time were a great step in advance, had a circulation of 1,000,000 copies, and were only superseded by others made in the light of past experience in the expanding movements of instruction. She was also a prolific author of articles and public addresses, often of great value, especially to the home and social life of American society. Her habit of correspondence with distinguished people in all departments of activity was continued till her death. She wrote a model hand, and was in the best sense a woman of the world-beautiful, accomplished, high principled, and tactful; but with all her womanly and social attainments concentrated on one supreme interest—the clevation of American young womanhood by the lever of an improved system of education of a genuine American type.

Another and most important step was taken in her refusal to organize her school on the regulation denominational religious platform. Her father's experience had long since made of the daughter at once a most devout and loyal member of a Christian church, a thorough hater of bigotry, and a dissenter from the ordinary ideas of denominational partisanship. Her letter to Rev. Dr. Beaman, then the head of the Albany Protestant pulpit, declining his offer to assume the office of religious instructor and pastoral guide to her seminary, and outlining her own ideal of religious instruction in a girl's college, is still excellent reading, and at that day must have exerted a great influence in high educational quarters. Her plan was to leave her girls free to attend the church of their own choice and derive from their pastors such spiritual aid and comfort as might be desired. But she assumed the responsibility of giving a "course of instruction in the fundamentals of natural and revealed religion, being careful to stop at the point where the different Christian sects divide." In a letter to Catherine E. Beecher, of Hartford, Conn., in 1829, she outlined her idea on the rising question of the generation, "woman's rights," but conservative in thought, she was ever mindful of the fact that her own seminary was a nursery of the great idea of the progress of American womanhood toward the goal of equal influence in American life, which is now the note of the higher society of the Republic.

It is not remarkable that a school organized on this principle at once assumed a leadership in American education. Her pupils were largely drawn from the most influential families of the whole country and from the remarkable class of able and accomplished girls who sought their outfit for a career of usefulness. The pecuniary outcome of the institution and the liberality of her patrons placed her above the necessity of that demoralizing yearly hunt for pupils that so degrades, especially a seminary for girls. In 1825 her husband died, and, with the help of her younger sister, already a distinguished teacher and author of text-books and afterwards the principal of excellent schools in Pennsylvania and Maryland, she assumed the entire control of the enterprise with eminent success, until she delivered it into the hands of her son and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. John Willard, in 1838, at the end of a career of unexampled prosperity. After the unhappy experience of an unfortunate marriage, from which she disentangled herself with the resolution and common sense conspicuous in all her undertakings, she established herself as a resident in the school grounds of her beloved seminary at Troy and gave herself to a life of beneficent activity. She was greatly interested in the establishment of a school for girls in Greece. She was