would be able to render. Time will not permit a more extended reference to this important agency in our educational work. But I venture to suggest that this Association at whose solicitation the bureau was established, take immediate steps to urge upon Congress the importance of providing for the publication of not less than ten thousand copies of its invaluable reports for its own distribution annually. 6.—American statesmen must rise to a proper conception of the grandeur of their opportunities and the magnitude of their duties in respect to the education of the people. And here I will content myself with a simple quotation from one who being dead yet speaketh with an eloquence which none can surpass. Says Horace Mann: "In our country and in our times, no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence, and by these he may claim in other countries the elevated rank of a statesman; but unless he speaks, plans, labors at all times and in all places for the culture and edification of the whole people, he cannot be an American statesman." In conclusion let me speak a few words in behalf of this Association as an agency in the great work of the future. Allusion has already been made to the fact of its modest beginning. Forty-three members were enrolled at the time of its organization. Thousands of the most active educators of the country have since participated in its deliberations and the best thoughts of hundreds of the best minds devoted to the work have been embodied and widely distributed in the reports of its proceedings, of which about five thousand volumes have been published. It was mainly through its direct agency that the Bureau of Education was established. Probably no one instrumentality has done more, directly and indirectly, to draw this great interest into the arena of National discussion or give it character both at home and abroad. Sustained hitherto solely by the voluntary contribution of its members who gather from all sections of the union at considerable pecuniary sacrifice, a necessity has arisen that some additional provision be made for enlarging the sphere of its usefulness by securing a moderate, permanent endowment. Shall the work be undertaken at this auspicious, centennial season? What more appropriate time or place could be presented? Here, where are assembled the men and women of large hearts and strong hands, here in this beautiful city, whose appreciation of universal education is attested by its magnificent system of public schools, by its comprehensive charities and reformatories embracing provision for every want and weakness of erring humanity, and last but not least, by its JohnsHopkins endowment for a grand university, the largest bequest ever made by a private citizen for educational purposes, here is the place and now is the time to accomplish the task. With this end attained we shall move forward to the great future with hope and courage, prepared to act well our part in the subjugation of ignorance and in achieving the patriotic purpose of elevating our country to that high eminence for which a merciful Providence so evidently designed it. Dr. E. T. TAPPAN moved that that part of the President's address referring to an endowment be referred to a special committee. The following named gentlemen were appointed: Messrs. S. H. WHITE, M. A. Newell, JOHN HANCOCK, JAMES CRUIKSHANK, and E. T. TAPPAN. On motion of W. D. HENKLE, the following persons were appointed a special committee on the Bureau of Education and Public Lands: J. P. WICKERSHAM, Pa., W. H. RUFFNER, Va., J. H. SMART, Ind., B. MALLON, Ga., J. H. Hoose, N. Y. After the appointment of this committee the Association was entertained with music. All further reference to music will be omitted, except in a note at the end of the minutes of the General Association. On motion of W. D. HENKLE, JAMES CRUIKSHANK, of New York, and A. ARMSTRONG, of Iowa, were appointed Assistant Secretaries. EVENING SESSION. The Association met at 8 o'clock. S. H. WHITE, from the Committee on Endowment and Life-membership, gave notice of a proposed amendment to the constitution, increasing the fee for Life-Membership, and providing for Life-Directorships, and the appointment of a Board of Trustees, to have charge of the safe keeping and investment of funds. On motion of the treasurer A. P. MARBLE, of Massachusetts, GEORGE R. NEWELL, FRANK ABORN, and C. C. ROUNDS, were appointed Assistant Treasurers. The President announced the following D. B. HAGAR, Mass., Committee on Nomination of Officers. C. C. ROUNDS, Maine, E. S. JOYNES, Tenn., B. MALLON, Ga., E. T. TAPPAN, Ohio, Mr. ROCHE, of Washington, referred to the system of Higher Education in vogue, and asked permission to give his views of needed improvements. Dr. HENDERSON, of Kentucky, raised the question whether the division of the Association into Sections was a constitutional provision. The chair so decided. He gave notice of a proposition to amend the constitution so that all business should be transacted in the general session. The Rev. A. D. MAYO, of Springfield, Mass., then delivered the following address on THE DEMANDS OF THE COMING CENTURY ON THE AMERICAN COMMON SCHOOL: The establishment of the government of the United States found New England, alone, in possession of a system of free schools for the whole people. Every great, good idea or constitution is the child of all things great and good that came before, but is also original, like every new child born into the world. A people at a white heat of consecration for civil and religious liberty assimilates history and strikes out great central plans which include the possibilities of coming generations. The colonists of Massachusetts Bay struck the key-note of the American system of education and their earliest statutes contain its fundamental principles. These fundamental principles are the following:-1st. That every child shall be freely offered the opportunity to obtain the intelligence and education essential to citizenship in a Republic. In the original statutes of Massachusetts Bay we find also the idea of compulsory education which this year has come to the front in the message of the President of the United States. 2d. That this education shall never be controlled by any party or sect, ecclesiastical, social, literary, or political. The common school shall be the child of the people, depending on the whole people for support and supervision. 3d. That the whole people be finally responsible for the cost of common education, that the schools may be free. Private aid was not discouraged; indeed from the first the rich Yankee felt the stress of a public opinion that to-day will not let a wealthy New-England man sleep quietly in his grave who has not given something to educate the people. But when private effort ceased, the people came in to sign the great bond of free instruction for all the children of the State. 4th. That this education as to quality and quantity shall be the best that can be obtained. The schoolmaster and schoolmistress of the old time were the flower of the youthful learning and character of the neighborhood;-the college students and graduates; the daughters of the minister, the doctor, the judge;-the best was none too good. As to quantity, they declared that the children should have all the education the people could be persuaded to pay for. Chief-Justice Shaw ruled that it was lawful to teach Hebrew in the common school if the people desired to pay for it. The New-England people began by giving generous State aid to every grade of education and the people of the United States have kept step to that music even to this day. 5th. That this school, from primary to college shall be essentially a school of character, imparting intellectual discipline with an eye to the making of the citizen and the ennobling of the man. The ideal of character in the school-room was the Christian ideal of the New Testament. In defence of the civil and religious liberty of the citizen and in tender reverence for the dawning conscience of the child, it insisted only on the fundamental elements of character, everywhere in christendom held as the commonplaces of public and private morality. But it never conceived the mischievous theory that respect for the individual conscience demands the expulsion from the school-room of everything any man may declare sectarian in morals or religion. Neither were they caught by that fallacy, repudiated by every great educator in the world, that mental training may safely be conducted apart from good discipline and instruction in the moralities that establish character. On these great pillars the people of New England built up their system of colonial popular education. The outcome of that school-house was seen in the war of the Revolution when these colonies gave 155,000 soldiers to the country; nearly three-fourths the entire number of men, 218,000, who followed Washington from Boston to Yorktown. So was this problem demonstrated, that the free education of the whole people makes for the patriotism and freedom that are the soul of a Republican State. The first question to the newly-established Republic was, substantially:Can this New-England system of popular education be nationalized? New England was still a country of liberal Englishmen of the middle class. But New York was cosmopolitan from the first;-Pennsylvania rent by fierce sectarian rivalries; the Southern Atlantic States feudal; and beyond the Alleghanies half a continent awaited the occupation of all who would freely come. The past century has been occupied by the working out of this problem : whether the Republic can receive a common system of culture and whether its key-note was struck in that first overture on the stormy coast of Massachusetts Bay. It may not have occurred to those who persistently deny the right of the general government to interfere in the education of the people, that it did interfere in the beginning and, by one act of consummate statesmanship, virtually established the common school of the New-England colonies as the American system of popular education. In the memorable ordinance of 1787, which created the West, the Congress of the Confederation wrote this far-reaching sentence:-" Religion, Morality, and Knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Bound by this compact, the new West received the most magnificent grant of public lands ever bestowed by a nation for popular education. Thus did the national government establish the free school in the new Republic and assert its right forever to aid and protect the children of the whole people in their divine right to be taught and trained for the citizenship of a free Republic. The leaders in western Education brought to the Northwest the radical foundation stones of the New-England school-house and College, and on these foundations have raised a structure, already the pride of the nation and the admiration of the world. In the later methods of instruction and details of organization, our western education has assimilated the most valuable elements of the German and British theories; but in every essential respect the American school beyond the Alleghanies to-day is the logical outgrowth of the colonial school of New England. The only real conflict has been in the middle and Southern States. And the strategic point of the battle of the schools has been the State of New York; a commonwealth imperial even in its errors, and, best of all the States, representing that cosmopolitanism, at once the glory and peril of the nation. In this State every cardinal principle of the original free school was obstinately questioned by eminent authorities. For half a century, American Education was debated in New York with an ability and persistence that no latter-day opponent of the American system can hope to rival. No State has furnished the cause of popular education more far-sighted friends than the Clintons, Randall, and Seward and in no State has the cause so often been in such deadly peril. New York abolished her rate-bill in 1850, thus assuring the freedom of elementary education. In 1872 the city of New York, erected the noblest Common-School building in America as a free high school and normal college for girls, supplementing her free academy for boys. In 1870 Cornell University arose by the united munificence of private gifts, State, and nation, opening its broad gates to men and women. And on the 4th of May, of the present year the old city of Albany, most stubborn of all conservative communities of the North, laid down the rusty arms with which for two hundred and fifty years she had fought the advancing power of popular education and dedicated her first free high-school house, a temple worthy a victory in such a cause. The victory in New York established the common school in Pennsylvania and New Jersey down to the Southern line. Such plans and ideals of education as filled the souls of Washington and Jefferson will keep. When the day of providential deliverence came, the people of the South made haste to adopt the American common school. Already is the common school in the South an established fact. And, happily, in this new soil there is no bar to the adoption of the finest methods of instruction and organization. I have never been so touched as by the singing of the colored children in the schools of Washington and have seen on their blackboards ornamental drawing of which old Boston might be proud. And there are communities that boast of pilgrim descent in New England where the methods of primary instruction are inferior to those in the new log school-houses in the pine-woods of the Carolinas. So has the American common school emerged from its century of trial and now stands up, essentially the same as an hundred years ago; yet broader and more complete in all its details; enriched with the contribution of the finest European thought and practice; marvellously adapted to every community to which it comes; another, and yet the same, just as you behold in the gracious woman who leads the social life of a new city on the Pacific Coast, only a revised and adorned edition of the little old grandmother that has come three thousand miles from dear Yankee-land to live out with the granddaughter her closing days; the same, plus all that culture and contact with finest native society and foreign travel can do for her. And as when she dresses herself in the old-time costume at the Centennial ball, her grandmother seems to dance once more before our eyes, so the American common school is the original thing that came out of the brains and hearts of the original school committees down East who "builded better than they |