goyne-thrèe; the siege of Yorktown-four; the Treaty of Páris-five; the inauguration of Washington—sìx. 5. And then it was súnrise of the new dày, of which we have seen yet only the glórious forenòon.

THOMAS STARR KING.

25. FREE SCHOOLS.

1. It is impossible for us adequately to conceive the boldness of the measure which aimed at universal education through the establishment of Free Schools. As a fact, it had no precedent in the world's history; and, as a theory, it could have been refuted and silenced by a more formidable array of argument and experience than was ever marshaled against any other institution of human origin.

2. But time has ratified its soundness. Two centuries of successful operation now proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, and as beneficent as it was disinterested. Every community in the civilized world awards it the meed of praise, and States at home, and nations abroad, in the order of their intelligence, are copying the bright example.

3. What we call the enlightened nations of Christendom are approaching, by slow degrees, to the moral elevation which our ancestors reached at a single bound; and the tardy convictions of the one have been assimilating, through a period of two centuries, to the intuitions of the other.

4. The establishment of Free Schools was one of those grand mental and moral experiments whose effects could not be developed and made manifest in a single generation. But now, according to the manner in which human life is computed, we are the sixth generation from its founders; and have we not reason to be grateful, both to God and man, for its unnumbered blessings? The

sincerity of our gratitude must be tested by our efforts to perpetuate and to improve what they established. The gratitude of the lips only is an unholy offering.

HORACE MANN.

26. THE BALLOT.

1. Consider, for a moment, what it is to cast a vòte. It is the token of inestimable privileges, and involves the responsibilities of an heréditary trust. It has passed into your hands as a right, reaped from fields of suffering and blood.

2. The grandeur of history is represented in your àct. Men have wrought with pen and tongue, and pined in dúngeons, and died on scaffolds, that you might obtain this symbol of freedom, and enjoy this consciousness of a sácred individuality. To the ballot have been transmítted, as it wére, the dignity of the scéptre and the potency of the sword.

3. And that which is so potent as a right, is also pregnant as a dûty; a duty for the présent and for the fùture. If you will, that folded leaf becomes a tongue of justice, a voice of òrder, a force of imperial làw— securing rights, abolishing abuses, erecting new institutions of truth and love. And, however you will, it is the expression of a solemn responsibility, the éxercise of an immeasurable power for good or for évil, nów and hereafter.

4. It is the medium through which you act upon your country-the organic nérre which incorporates you with its life and welfare. There is no agent with which the possibilities of the republic are more intimately invólved, none upon which we can fall back with more confidence than the ballot-box.

E. H. CHAPIN.

27. EDUCATIONAL POWER.

1. The true teacher must have the faith of martyrs. In the limited horizon of the school-room, the teacher can dimly see only the beginning of the effects of his training upon his pupils. The solid and lasting results, the building up of character, the creative power of motives, are made evident only in the wider circle of the world, and at the end of a life-time. Hence the power of the teacher, like that of the silent and invisible forces of nature, is only feebly realized.

2. I once visited, in the Sierra, a quartz mine of fabulous richness. Deep in the bowels of the earth, swarthy miners were blasting out the gold-bearing rock; above, the powerful mill was crushing the quartz with its iron teeth. In the office, piles of yellow bars, ready to be sent to the mint to be poured into the channels of trade, showed the immediate returns of well-directed labor and wisely invested capital. An hour later, I stepped into a public school-house not half a mile distant, where fifty children were conning their lessons. What does the school yield, I asked myself, on the investment of money by the State? The returns of the mine were made in solid bullion; the school returns were all far in the unknown future.

3. I crossed the continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic on the grandest commercial highway ever built, and all along, towns, villages, cities, mines, farms, machine shops, manufactories, and converging roads bore evidence of the mighty physical forces of the nation; and when I entered a meeting of the National Educational Association in a Boston school-house, where two hundred thoughtful men and women were assembled, it seemed, after witnessing the gigantic play of industrial and commercial forces, that the school-masters and school-mistresses were lookers-on and idlers in the bustling life around.

4. But when, in the mild summer evening, I walked under the elms of Boston Common and reflected that independence was once only a dim idea in the minds of a few leading patriots; that the engine which had whirled me over the iron track, three thousand miles in seven days, was once only an idea in the brain of an enthusiast; that the telegraph wires, radiating like nerves from the centers of civilization, were created by the inventive genius of an educated thinker, I realized that there is a silent power, mightier than all mechanical forces, which preserves, directs, and controls the material prosperity of a great nation.

5. I go out into the streets of the great commercial center of our country. I hear everywhere the hum of industry, and see around the stir of business. I see the steamships plying like gigantic shuttles to weave a network of commercial relations between the new world and the old. I see the smoke of manufactories where skillful artisans are constructing the marvelous productions of inventive genius. The banks are open; keen capitalists are on 'Change; and the full tide of humanity is pulsating through every artery of the town. The results of business are solid and tangible. I step into the New York Normal College where a thousand young women are fitting for the profession of teaching, and if asked for the tangible results of the educational investment, the evidences are not at hand.

6. But when I pause to consider that intelligence is the motive power of trade; that the city with its banks, warehouses, churches, residences, and manufactories, is the product of skilled labor; that the steamship is navigated by means of science, and is built as a triumph of art: that science surveyed the railroad lines, and that skill runs the trains freighted with the products of industry and art; then I begin to perceive some connection between educational forces and the material results of civilization.

28.

SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS.

1. Looking into the near future, I see the aisles of the school-room widen into the broad streets of the city. The boys are business men. One commands the steamship, one operates the telegraph, and another runs an engine; one is a railroad director, and another rides over the road to take his seat in the senate of the United States. One works a gold mine, another an iron mine, and another a coal mine; one is a merchant, one a banker, one a Wall-street speculator; one is a farmer in the west, another a manufacturer in the east; one is a merchant, another a mechanic, and a third is an inventor.

2. The girls have become women. Some preside as queens in home circles, some are teachers, some are writers, some are artists, and others are skilled in household work. I realize that the life of a nation is made up of mothers that guard the homes of the men who drive the plow, build the ships, run the mills, work the mines, construct machinery, print the papers, shoulder the musket, and cast the ballots; and it is for all these that the public schools have done and are now doing their beneficent work.

3. When I ponder over the far-reaching influence of the teacher and the school, I comprehend, in some measure, the relation to our national well-being, of our American system of free public schools-the best, notwithstanding its defects and shortcomings, that the world has ever known. It is the duty of every teacher to strive with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, to perfect a system of education which shall train a race of men and women in the next generation, that shall inherit, with the boundless resources of our favored land, something of the energy, enterprise, talent, and character of the sturdy pioneers who settled and subdued the wilderness.