industrial training. The documents are too long to quote and too many to be even indicated; but they are noble reading. One brief excerpt must suffice. In February, 1830, a committee of the Philadelphia Mechanics' Union reported to a meeting of "the friends of general and equal education" a long and remarkable statement on conditions in Pennsylvania, with a draft of a bill to correct the evils. Three evenings were devoted by the meeting to discussion of the report, after which it was unanimously adopted. The report was widely copied in labor papers. It protests against the absence of all schools in many districts, the pauper character of such as exist, their limited instruction, and the absence of any attempt to supply a "judicious infant training" for children under five. Their own bill, the committee claim, will extend schools throughout the whole commonwealth; will place them "immediately under the control and suffrage of the people"; and "its benefits and privileges will not, as at present, be limited, as an act of charity, to the poor alone, but will extend equally and of right to all classes, and be supported at the expense of all.”

And the

press

Toward this call for free schools for the people, the capitalistic press adopted a tone of condescending reproof. It reminded the workers that more education was alcapitalist ready attainable by the poor in America than anywhere else. Much more could never be expected. "The peasant must labor during those hours of the day which his wealthy neighbor can give to abstract culture: otherwise the earth would not yield enough for the subsistence of all.” And again, "Education . . . must be the work of individuals.

If a government concern, nothing could prevent it from becoming a political job." Many leading papers reviled the idea of free public schools as "Agrarianism” or “an arbitrary division of property." And one editor deplores the taking away from "the more thriving members" of the working classes "one of their chief incitements to industry,

the hope of earning the means of educating their children." Indeed, it is hard to find any of the hoary argu

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ments, still furbished anew against every democratic proposal, which were not worn threadbare in the thirties in opposition to a free-school system.

III. INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

Throughout the East in 1830, we have noted, elementary public schools were lacking or poor. Their revival was owing first of all to the persistent demand by the work- Horace ingmen. That agitation prepared the ground for Mann the work of humanitarian reformers led by Horace Mann. Through Mann's efforts, Massachusetts created a State Board of Education in 1837 and established the first American Normal School in 1839. By such forces, a good system of "common schools" soon spread over the Eastern States.

Meantime the Northwest, where all men were workingmen, was setting up, on paper at least, a complete system of free public education, such as the workingmen of Education the East were vainly asking for. In the West, in the West elementary schools drew some help from the national land grant in the Survey Ordinance (page 255), and State "universities" were founded early to save the national grant for "higher institutions of learning" (page 256). A State It was natural therefore for the West to try to system link primary school and university by public "high-schools,” so as to form a complete State system. The constitution of Indiana in 1816 declared it the duty of the legislature to establish "a general system of education, ascending in regular graduation from township schools to a State University, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all."

In practice, however, private academies made the chief link between elementary schools and college for two generations more. Even the primary schools were often more imposing on paper than in fact; and in many States the land grants were wasted or stolen by incompetent or venal politicians. Still, by 1840, public schools were frequent enough in the Northwest, as in the Northeast, so that a

poor boy with ambition and self-denial could usually get at least "a common school education."

"Higher education" made even more progress than did the common schools. The Western "universities" were paper universities for some time more; but the "small college" multiplied in numbers and grew toward high standards and enlarged usefulness, especially in the Northeast. Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Hobart, Williams, in that section, had multitudes of ambitious imitators in the Southern and Northwestern States. Every Southern planter sent his sons to college, as a matter of course,

very often to the larger Northern institutions. In proportion to the White population, therefore, the South had more youth in college, down to the Civil War, than any other section. In 1830 Oberlin, in Ohio, opened its doors to women. No other institution of equal rank did so for twenty years more; but many "seminaries" for girls soon appeared.

American letters

The first real flowering in American literature came just after 1830. America's only earlier distinction in letters had been in political oratory. In this field, from 1812 to 1830, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun sustained the best traditions of the Revolutionary days; and those same years saw also the early work of Irving, Cooper, Simms, and Bryant. All these long continued to grow in fame. And now, between 1830 and 1845, began the public career of Edward Everett in oratory; of Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, and Whittier in the literature of creative imagination and spiritual power; of Bancroft, Prescott, Palfrey, and Sparks in historical composition; of Kent and Story in legal commentary; of Audubon, Agassiz, Dana, Maury, and Asa Gray in science. Noah Webster's Dictionary was published in 1828; ten years later, the Smithsonian Institution was founded; and, midway between, appeared the first penny daily, the New York Sun.

New England had the chief glory in this literary outburst; but all the old sections shared in it, and the Northwest gave it as eager appreciation as New England itself. The Southern aristocracy had little sympathy with

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"Yankee" literature, tinged as most of it was with antislavery sentiment, but clung conservatively to the old English classics and to such moderns as Scott, along with its own representatives in the lists above.

democracy

The finest part of this literary movement was rooted in a New England religious awakening. Between 1815 and 1830, Unitarianism, organized by William Ellery UnitarianChanning, had deeply modified New England ism and thought. Unitarianism was an intellectual revolt against the somber and rigid doctrines of the prevalent Calvinistic Congregationalism. It placed hope of salvation not in the dogma of the atonement, but in conduct; it asserted, in opposition to the doctrine of total depravity, that there was essential good in every man, with possibilities of infinite development. It taught, not that man's fate was predestined, but that he was himself master of his fate. At first it was as sternly logical as Calvinism itself; but the Emersonian "Transcendentalists" of the thirties placed emphasis

upon its cheering affir- RALPH WALDO EMERSON. The statue by Daniel

mations rather than its

Chester French at the public library of Concord, Emerson's home.

denials, and gave the movement a joyous moral enthusiasm. It was both a cause and a result of the progress in democracy. The old Congregationalism had been the fast ally of aristocratic Federalism: Unitarianism was an expression of a democratic age.

Differ

as they might in characteristics, Emerson and Andrew Jackson belonged fundamentally to the same era, the serene prophet of the spiritual worth and dignity of each soul, and the passionate apostle of political and social equality.

Unitarianism never counted large in numbers; but nearly all the famous names catalogued above were connected with it, and it early captured Harvard. Gradually, it permeated and transformed Calvinistic Congregationalism. A less rigidly intellectual revolt against Calvinism,-more emotional than Unitarianism and equally optimistic and democratic, — gave rise to Universalism and to a growth of the Methodist churches and of various new sects. Said Emerson of this theological thaw," ""Tis a whole population of ladies and gentlemen out in search of a religion.”

66

The intellectual and religious ferment of the thirties transformed society. Exact and profound scholarship was

"Plain living

and high

still lacking; but an aspiration for knowledge, a hunger for culture, a splendid idealism, became characteristics of American life, — until thinking' "fattened out," for a time after 1875, by a gross material prosperity. During that long era, to welcome "high thinking" at the price of "plain living" was instinctive in an almost unbelievably large portion of the people. Ambitious boys, barefoot and in threadworn coats, thronged the little colleges, not for four years of a good time, but with genuine passion to break into the fairy realm of knowledge;1 and their hard-earned dimes that did not have

1 In 1846 a boy of eighteen started for Knox College, at Galesburg, Illinois. By working as a farm hand (he harvested two weeks for a Virgil and a Latin Dictionary), and by teaching school for a few months (and "boarding round") at eight dollars a month, he had saved up ten dollars. He walked first to Chicago, the nearest town, for supplies; but the unaccustomed temptation of the display in a bookstore window lured him within, and most of his capital went for a few books, which would seem old-fashioned, indeed, to the boys of to-day. The remaining cash bought only a pair of shoes and an Indian-blanket coat (with great stripes about the bottom). To save the precious shoes, he then walked the two hundred miles from his home to Galesburg barefoot. His first day there, he built a fence for the President's cow pasture, to earn money for textbooks, and found a place to work for his board through the college year. This man became one of the notable builders of a Western commonwealth, and his story is a typical one.