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5,000 people within its borders. Milwaukee was founded in 1835 and in this year the Territory sent its first delegate, George W. Jones, to Congress, and assumed its proper condition of separate Territorial existence in 1836. In 1836 the first Territorial legislature held its session, and in that year the first public school was opened, taught by Mr. West in Milwaukee. In 1838 the legislature took up its residence in the beautiful capital city of Madison, and in 1841 J. D. Doty was appointed governor. In 1846 the people voted on the decisive change to Statehood, and in 1848 Wisconsin was admitted to the Union-seventeenth of the new and thirtieth of the entire group of American Commonwealths. There were but 10,000 people in the Territory in 1836; but twelve years later, on its admission to the Union, there were 210,000.

The beginning of the common school in Wisconsin, in 1836, was made under the Michigan Territorial law. In 1836 the State University was nominally established by the dedication of two townships of Government lands, 46,000 acres, as its endowment, and the choice of Madison as its seat. Its original organization followed that of Michigan, and included the impracticable New York and Georgia scheme of making the university the working hand, instead of the crown, of the entire public school system; including, also, the establishment of subordinate schools and a board of examiners for them. At the beginning, apparently without serious debate, the public school system was rescued from all ecclesiastical entanglements by a declaration of absolute religious freedom in its administration.

In the first constitution of the State we read:

ARTICLE X.-Education.

SEC. 1. The supervision of public instruction shall be vested in a State superintendent and such other officers as the legislature shall direct. The State superintendent shall be chosen by the qualified electors of the State, in such manner as the legislature shall provide; his powers, duties, and compensation shall be prescribed by law: Provided, That his compensation shall not exceed the sum of twelve hundred dollars annually.

SEC. 2. The proceeds of all lands that have been or hereafter may be granted by the United States to the State for educational purposes (except the lands heretofore granted for the purposes of a university), and all moneys and the clear proceeds of all property that may accrue to the State by forfeiture or escheat, and all moneys which may be paid as an equivalent for exemption from military duty, and the clear proceeds of all fines collected in the several counties for any breach of the penal laws, and all moneys arising from any grant to the State where the purposes of such grant are not specified, and the five hundred thousand acres of land to which the State is entitled by the provisions of an act of Congress entitled "An act to appropriate the proceeds of the sales of the public lands and to grant preemption rights,” approved the fourth day of September, one thousand eight hundred and forty-one, and also the five per centum of the net proceeds of the public lands to which the State shall become entitled on her admission into the Union (if Congress shall consent to such appropriation of the two grants last mentioned), shall be set apart as a separate fund, to be called the school fund, the interest of which, and all other revenues derived from the school lands, shall be exclusively applied to the following objects, to wit:

1. To the support and maintenance of common schools in each school district and the purchase of suitable libraries and apparatus therefor.

2. The residue shall be appropriated to the support and maintenance of academies and normal schools and suitable libraries and apparatus therefor.

3. The legislature shall provide by law for the establishment of district schools, which shall be as nearly uniform as practicable; and such schools shall be free and without charge for tuition to all children between the ages of four and twenty years, and no sectarian instruction shall be allowed therein.

4. Each town and city shall be required to raise by tax, annually, for the support of common schools therein, a sum not less than one-half the amount received by such town or city, respectively, for school purposes from the income of the school fund. 5. Provision shall be made by law for the distribution of the income of the school fund among the several towns and cities of the State, for the support of common schools therein, in some just proportion to the number of children and youth resident therein between the ages of four and twenty years, and no appropriation shall be made from the school fund to any city or town for the year in which said city or town shall fail to raise such tax, nor to any school district for the year in which a school shall not be maintained for at least three months.

6. Provision shall be made by law for the establishment of a State university at or near the seat of the State government, and for connecting with same, from time to time, such colleges, in different parts of the State, as the interests of education may require. The proceeds of all lands that have been or may hereafter be granted by the United States for the support of a university shall be and remain a perpetual fund, to be called the "university fund," the interest of which shall be appropriated to the use of a State university, and ro sectarian instruction shall be allowed in said university.

7. The secretary of state, treasurer, and attorney-general shall constitute a board of commissioners for the sale of the school and university lands and for the investment of the funds arising therefrom. Any two of said commissioners shall be a quorum for the transaction of all business pertaining to the duties of their office. 8. Provision shall be made by law for the sale of all school and university lands after they shall have been appraised, and when any portion of such lands shall be sold, and the purchase money shall not be paid at the time of the sale, the commissioners shall take security by mortgage upon the land sold for the sum remaining unpaid, with seven per cent interest thereon, payable annually at the office of the treasurer. The commissioners shall be authorized to execute a good and sufficient conveyance to all purchasers of such lands, and to discharge any mortgages taken as security when the sum due thereon shall have been paid. The commissioners shall have power to withhold from sale any portion of said land when they shall deem it expedient, and shall invest all moneys arising from the sale of such lands, as well as all other university and school funds, in such manner as the legislature shall provide, and shall give such security for the faithful performance of their duties as may be required by law.

In 1850, at the second session of the State legislature, a complete system of public schools was established by law and a State superintendent of education appointed. The second report of Superintendent Root, in 1851, shows a phenomenal increase of interest during the first term of his administration. There were then 29 counties and 339 towns in the State; 1,800 entire and 700 partial school districts; 2,200 places where public school work was actually going on, with 68,000 children enrolled; 67 per cent of the school population in some sort of attendance five months in the year; men teachers receiving $17 and women $8 per month. There was $173,000 invested in 1,223 schoolhouses. There were also 87 private schools in the State, in which 3,500 pupils were instructed. The State school fund at that early period of its development amounted to $538,000, with an income of $47,000, about half a dollar a year to each child. Ten per cent of the State fund was appropriated for school libraries. This was the first response of Wisconsin to the new departure of its earliest State legislature in abolishing all Territorial statutes and inaugurating a complete system of instruction for the Commonwealth.

With this splendid record of the fifth and last of the original Northwestern States admitted to the Union, we suspend the attractive task of telling the story of the great development of popular education in the Northwest.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE AMERICAN COMMON SCHOOL IN NEW ENGLAND FROM 1790 TO 1840.

By Rev. A. D. MAYO, M. A., LL. D.

In a speech in the British Parliament, on the "Government plan of education," in 1847, Thomas Babington Macaulay said: "Illustrious forever in history were the founders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; though their love of freedom of conscience was illimitable and indestructible, they could see nothing servile or degrading in the principle that the State should take upon itself the charge of the education of the people."

We have traced the New England idea of universal education from its incorporation in the earliest colonial law of 1642 till the formation of the constitution of the State of Massachusetts, in 1780, the first time the duty of the State to educate the whole people was placed in the written fundamental law of a Commonwealth. Beginning now with Massachusetts, we are to follow the working out of this original ideal through what may be called the period of conflict; for through the first half century of the Republic the great enterprise, so bravely inaugurated and persisted in for one hundred and fifty years by the foremost colonies of New England, of schooling the entire population by the aid of a people's government, found itself beset with new difficulties and somewhat arrested in its logical development. No study can be more instructive in the peculiar method by which a characteristic American State, by means direct and indirect, encounters, deals with, and finally overcomes a great public peril than the story of the American common school during this most critical period in its career. For it must be evident to every careful student of the national history that had this fundamental institution of the New England civilization gone down in the struggle, the final establishment of any satisfactory scheme of universal education for the whole people of the United States would have either been an impossibility or have suffered an "indefinite postponement."

The victory in the war for independence and the mighty effort of organizing the new nationality of the United States were not achieved without the reaction on society, inevitable from every supreme effort of human nature. One of the most important of these results was the final breaking up of the virtual unanimity of religious belief and ecclesiastical administration which, for almost two centuries, had held the New England people in a grip of iron, and was the central inspiration of all activities in church, state, education, and social life. Even before the breaking out of the war the indications of this great change were apparent. Indeed, after the first forty years in the Massachusetts colony, the attempt to found a government on a theocracy of the Old Testament pattern had been abandoned with the abolition of the religious test of the suffrage. There still remained a personal tax imposed on every citizen for the support of public worship; but in time this was modified by the permission to appropriate it according to the ecclesiastical convictions of the taxpayer. But this was not felt to be a hardship in a community as

completely of one mind in religious matters as has ever been seen in any intelligent portion of Christendom. It has already been explained how, because of this unanimity in theological belief and church polity, the "religious question," which beyond the Hudson River for generations prevented the establishment of any general system of public instruction, did not appear as an obstacle in the leading New England colonies. For, while, as a matter of course, there was a good deal of religious teaching in all the schools, it did not provoke dissent, and, below the organism of the ecclesiastical congregational polity, the people had their own way in all public affairs. Until the period now considered the schools were all essentially public, being to a greater or less extent supported by State or local aid and always dependent on the legislature for their final status.

But the prodigious agitation of the Revolutionary epoch, with the intimate mingling of the New England soldiery, the majority in the field, with the people of the other colonies, brought in a loosening of the bonds of religious uniformity and filled the land with dissent and contention in the most vital concerns of the public welfare. Already, half a century before the Revolution, Harvard College, the theological barometer of Massachusetts, had been shaken by frequent outbreaks of what were regarded by the extreme religious party as "unsettled and heretical views" in matters religious. The old severe type of student discipline, imported from the British schools, had been overthrown. The offensive discrimination in social standing in classing the students had been done away with. An important official of the university had been chosen from the laity. In every struggle between the more stringent and liberal elements in the election of president and members of the faculty the victory more and more inclined to the broad-church side. It was a striking fact that even in the days of complete outward unanimity of religious sentiment and in the relentless application of a severe creed even to the affairs of social life neither Harvard University nor the grammar schools that were tributary to it were bound by any theological test. It was the inevitable development of this ideal of the freedom of education that now for a time came in, and, by its sharp collisions with the principle of denominational control of schools, greatly embarrassed the entire system of public instruction in New England for half a century.

The first result of this movement was the dissent of a considerable branch of the New England people from the dominant church and the coming up of the Baptist, Methodist, and Independent organizations. The Revolutionary epoch left a great deposit of open and secret unbelief in any form of Christianity, which the intimate connection of the American people with France and the popular sympathy with the earlier phases of the French Revolution intensified. The extreme republican views of Thomas Jefferson and the rising party in public affairs that owed allegiance to him provoked a strong reaction in the New England States, and the Puritan clergy became, in large measure, his most decided opponents.

The first educational demonstration was the effort to present Yale College in Connecticut to the people as the theological rival of Harvard, and for several years this institution contained the larger number of students. As early as 1762 the attempt to establish a rival college in Massachusetts alarmed the friends of Harvard. But it was not till 1795 that the free school, supported by the legacy of Col. Ephraim Williams, who lost his life in the French war in 1755, appeared as a challenge to Harvard in Williams College, in the northwest corner of the State.

Within ten years the remarkable religious movement that was the origin of the American Foreign Missionary Society gave to this new college, on the far-off border of the State, a name and fame it has never lost. Later came the establishment of Amherst College, in the valley of the Connecticut, in the year 1818, developed also from an academy founded in that beautiful village as early as 1815. Both these new colleges, with Harvard, up to the year 1840 were to a greater or less extent the recipients of the State's bounty; and, while greatly extending the application of good culture to the people, were also powerful instrumentalities in the develop

ment of the religious dissent that wrought at cross-purposes with the complete success of the people's common school.

For it must always be kept in mind that the Massachusetts policy of general education, afterwards developed into the idea of the American common school, included all grades of instruction. It began at the top, in the founding of Harvard College in 1637, by what was then a munificent endowment for a colony so small and straitened in the goods of this world. To all intents and purposes Harvard was as essentially a State university during the first century of its existence as any of the great schools called by this name later in the West. The legislature of the colony always claimed and exercised the right of changing its organization, to a considerable extent subsidized it, and, till a later period, the governor, lieutenant-governor, and a portion of the senate of the State were included in its board of overseers. The liberal arrangements and free spirit which, from the beginning, had characterized this in many respects most catholic of American universities kept it in close communication with the public grammar schools on which it depended for its student material. For many years the grammar and even the common district schools of the State were being taught by the clergy, students, and young graduates of the university and the colleges.

These "free schools," " grammar schools,” “academies" were the second step made by the people of the colony toward a complete system of public instruction, already a sort of university extension "dispensed to the superior people." During the entire period before the Revolution they constituted the most influential department of the common school system. With few exceptions organized by a movement of the whole people, incorporated by the legislature, their boards of administration chosen by the people or appointed in their charter, to a considerable extent supported by public appropriations, State or local, these seminaries were the ancestors of the free high school which now in Massachusetts has obtained its highest development in the Union. Ninety per cent of the children of that State live in towns where a high school is located and all towns are empowered to support students in them-the only State in which the establishment of this class of schools is made compulsory by legal enactment.

In the year 1789 the somewhat languid organization of public instruction below the free grammar schools was strengthened by the act requiring every town of 100 families to maintain 1 school for six months, or 2 or more for terms that should together be equivalent to six months, in which should be taught orthography, reading, writing, English grammar, geography, and "decent behavior." From this act dates the appearance of the "district school system" in New England, by which every town was divided into districts, to favor the attendance of the children. Towns of 200 families and upward were required to support a grammar school and teachers to obtain a certificate of good morals and reliable character. In 1800 the towns were empowered to call meetings of the people of their districts for the purpose of raising money to build and furnish schoolhouses, and in 1817 school districts were made corporations and empowered to hold property for educational purposes.

This organization of public instruction, by making the district within the town the unit of activity, was a natural outcome of the intensely independent character of the New England people, who reluctantly parted with the least fragment of local authority. It was also, in great measure, enforced upon the people by the necessities of the case; the population outside the villages living in a sparsely settled, rural country; the towns 6 miles square; rapid transit impossible from the borders over the lofty hills and through the dense forests, and during the winter greatly hindered by deep snows and the severity of the weather.

There was yet no educational State school fund, the earliest movement for this dating from 1834, and there has never been in Massachusetts any considerable State tax for education; up to a very late period all, save perhaps $150,000, of the nearly $10,000,000 expended on schools in the State being raised by local taxation, personal

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