50 teachers' institutes. 7. The changing of two-thirds of the private academies and seminaries into public graded schools. 8. A great improvement in school furniture and apparatus. 9. "The awakening and building up of an all-powerful and constantly growing public opinion in all portions of the State, especially in the southern, in favor of public education, which has had no parallel in the history of the country." He predicts that if the next two years follow this example, Illinois will be educationally second in public-school eminence to no State in the Union. An interesting feature of this great advancement in the cause of public education is the development of the school system in the city of Chicago. As late as 1831, near the time when Massachusetts woke up after a common-school experiment of two hundred years to the educational movement of the new time, the village of Chicago by the lake side began its illustrious educational career through the establishment of its first common schools. The school lands, donated to the township by the General Government, had been sold and the avails turned over to a board which had established a district school in the basement of a church. Other townships united to raise this to a sort of semipublic training school for teachers and such children as attended. In this somewhat undefined way the number of schools increased to seven in 1835. In that year, under a special law that encouraged the formation of school districts, the charge of the fund was delivered into the hands of four of these. In 1837 Chicago became a city, and the common council was made commissioners of schools. They were required to appoint a body of inspectors, five to twelve, and did appoint ten in 1837. In 1839, by special act of the legislature, the foundation of the present system of common schools of Chicago was laid. Seven inspectors and three trustees of each of the new districts were appointed.

At this period Chicago was a place of 4,800 population, and its schools were taught by four masters, working at $33.33 per month, eleven months of the year, five and one-half days of the week. A tax of 2 mills on the dollar was levied and schoolhouses built to supply the demand for a constantly increasing population. In 1850 there were 4 male and 20 female teachers, and the city had a population of 30,000. A system of Saturday institutes was organized for the instruction of the teachers. In 1854 the office of city superintendent was created, and the first superintendent was Mr. John C. Dore. The development was steady. A high school was established, and efforts were made to bring superior teachers to the city. In 1855 there were 7 grammar schools, 35 teachers, and 3,000 pupils for a city of 70,000 people, with a property valuation of $24,000,000.

In 1856 Mr. W.H. Wells, principal of the Westfield State Normal School of Massachusetts, was invited to the superintendency of the Chicago system of schools. At this time it was estimated that at least 3,000 children in the city were destitute of the means of education. The new superintendent labored to overcome this and the extremely transient character of a school attendance which made school-teaching almost the endless shouting after a throng rushing through a turnpike gate. A high-school building, at a cost of $50,000, was erected to accommodate 350 pupils, and the school was made coeducational under the principalship of Mr. Charles A. Dupee, a graduate of Yale College. A normal department was attached, with an attendance of 40 girls.

Like other new cities of the West, the city of Chicago suffered great loss by the premature sale of its school lands. As early as 1835 all but four of the original blocks of this property, "against the protest of 95 per cent of the people of Chicago," was sold for $38,865, on credits of one, two, and three years. This property in 1860 was valued at $12,000,000, and, if now owned by the city at its present valuation, would enable Chicago to support the most extended municipal system of education in the Union. The remaining four blocks, in 1860, were rated at $700,000. In 1839 the school fund of the city was taken from the superior body of the city ED 99-25

commissioners and intrusted to the city council. Under the wise administration of an agent of this board, for thirteen years, it was saved from utter destruction, and in 1860 was estimated in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. In 1860 Chicago was the largest city in the West, except St. Louis, which had undergone a similar experience in the official plunder of its valuable school lands. In 1853 Chicago expended $62,000 on its system of public instruction.

It was a great, good Providence that left the new public-school system of Illinois, at the breaking out of the civil war, buttressed by the services, in commanding positions, of three men of such admirable quality as Newton Bateman, State superintendent of public instruction; William H. Wells, superintendent of the common schools of Chicago; and Richard Edwards, principal of the State Normal University at Bloomington.

The biennial report of Superintendent Bateman, in 1860, was one of the ablest up to that time presented to any Western legislature, ranking with those of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard in grasp of the subject, completeness of its statistics, and the discussion of the methods of pushing the great reform in the common schools, to whose appreciation the State had finally come; a late but no less a powerful and enthusiastic advocate. With a wise diagnosis of the public opinion of the State, the superintendent set himself at once to correct a mistaken idea of the school system and laws that so impeded the progress of the good cause, and succeeded to the extent that he soon reduced the complainants to the minority composed of the inevitable professional critics and chronic grumblers that we always have with us." With a keen sense of the defects of the new school law, especially ts complicated and cumbrous method of administration, Superintendent Bateman advised against radical attempts to change it in the face of the rising agitation of the public mind on the salvation of the Union. His entire analysis of the methods of primary instruction was one of the first, and remains one of the best, presentations addressed to an American legislature in advocacy of the new education. He urged the important matters of improved school administration and the State Normal University with great zeal, earnestness, and discretion. Dr. Bateman held the office of State superintendent of instruction during the civil war, and afterwards served in a variety of important offices, including the presidency of Knox College and the State Normal University.

Superintendent Bateman was a native of the State of New Jersey and, like so many of the most celebrated public characters of the country, rose to his distinguished position as one of the leaders of the new education in the Western States through years of effort and sacrifices almost incredible. He was taken to Illinois as a child of 10 years, and, like Horace Mann, at 16 had only the rudiments of a very common education. But by persistent effort at self-help he pushed his way through Illinois College at Jacksonville and Lane Theological Seminary, Ohio, where he obtained great help and encouragement from its president, Dr. Lyman Beecher. For a time engaged in the very useful and educating pursuit of a traveling agent, he began his career as teacher at St. Louis in a public school in 1845. From this he rose in rapid succession to the positions of professor of mathematics in St. Charles College, Missouri; the head of the free public school of Jacksonville, Ill., including the office of principal of the high school, in which he fitted more than a hundred students for college. In 1858 he became principal of the Jacksonville Female Academy and served four years as city superintendent of schools. In 1854 he was one of the founders of the Illinois State Teachers' Association and became a very popular editor of the Illinois Teacher and State Educational Agent, in the service of the association. In 1859 he was chosen as State superintendent of public instruction and served with distinguished ability and success through the dark days of the civil war.

It is impossible to realize the value of such a man in these difficult posts of educational administration at a crisis in the common-school affairs so perilous as

when the great sacrifices of patriotic obligation were naturally made the excuse for the neglect of that education of the whole people on which is founded the entire development of good citizenship. Dr. Bateman appears again in the State of Illinois and the Northwest during the important educational movement of the past thirty years. Three years previous to his election to the office of State superintendent of public instruction the city of Chicago had also gained a prize in the call of Mr. William H. Wells, of Connecticut, to the office of city superintendent of common schools. For twenty years, 1834 to 1854, the common schools of Chicago had been making their way upward against all the obstacles which beset an institution outside the domain of the few materialistic interests which dominate the beginnings of a great American town. Once, in 1838, the almost fatal blow of the plunder of the school lands of the city, by which a property in 1860 worth $12,000,000 was disposed of for $38,000, threatened the destruction of the infant enterprise. Indeed, until the city superintendency was first established, in 1854, the schools were involved in all the diseases that threaten the life of any young institution without a head. In 1856 Mr. Wells was called from the principalship of the State Normal School at Westfield, Mass., to this most important and laborious position.

William Henry Wells was a native of Connecticut, born in 1812, the son of a plain farmer, and, like so many New England boys of that day, earned his education by the sweat of his brow as well as the sweat of the brain. After a disappointment in his projected occupation, his genius for instruction was developed in the country district school of the period, as a teacher in secondary schools in Hartford, Conn., and in the private normal school of Dr. S. R. Hall, at Andover, Mass., where he remained eleven years; at Phillips Academy, Andover, and in the Putnam free school, of Newburyport, Mass., where he laid the foundations of his future eminence. As an institute conductor and worker in teachers' associations and serving as president of the Massachusetts Teachers' Association, he became widely known. In 1854 he was called to the principalship of the State Normal School, at Westfield, Mass., and for two years served with great success in this seminary, afterwards celebrated by the long mastership of Dr. John W. Dickinson, for seventeen years secretary of the Massachusetts State board of education. He went to Chicago at a critical period in the educational affairs of that growing city. His first work was the building up of the free high school and rearranging the primary department of instruction. His constructive ability and activity, reenforced by his long experience in all varieties of instruction, made his administration all that could be desired for the permanent planting of the schools of a great Western American city. He was also known as the author of an English grammar, which had a circulation of 300,000 copies. The breaking out of the civil war found him at this most important point and the rudder of the school ship was in safe hands through these tempestuous years.

The State was no less indebted to the two remarkable men who founded the Normal University at Bloomington and presided over its beginnings from 1858 until the close of the war period-President C. E. Hovey and Richard Edwards. Charles Edward Hovey was born in Vermont in 1827, of one of the class of New England farmers of half a century ago from whom went forth a host of men and women second to none in the country in ability, worth, and distinguished services during the period of which we now write. At the age of 25 he graduated from Dartmouth College, having taught district schools at vacation to "keep the pot boiling," and after his graduation he became principal of the free high school at Framingham, Mass. In 1854 he removed to Peoria, Ill., where he became, first, principal, and, afterwards, superintendent of the new free schools of that city. He wisely took along a “helpmeet for him" in the person of Miss Harriet F. Spofford, of Andover, Mass., a lady whose excellent family descent was reenforced by an enviable reputation made, on her own account, as assistant teacher in Peoria.

As the wife of Mr. Hovey, after a long and successful career as teacher, this lady finally became the chief among the group of excellent and accomplished women gathered around Hon. John Eaton, through the organization and development of the United States Bureau of Education at Washington, D. C. Mrs. Hovey still (1900) occupies a most responsible position under the United States Commissioner of Education.

In his new post, at Peoria, Superintendent Hovey at once came to the front among the group of hard workers and hard fighters for the children. His influence was felt, not only in placing the schools of the city on a firm foundation, but at the statehouse, in advocacy of the series of measures that culminated in the revised school system of 1856. He became widely known as a popular lecturer on education; the president of the Illinois State Teachers' Association; the successful manager of the Illinois Teachers' Journal, and an influential advocate of the establishment of the State Normal University. In 1857 he was appointed to visit the normal schools of the East. In October of the same year, with one assistant and a handful of pupils, he laid the foundation of one of the most successful of this type of institutions in the country. The city of Peoria failed in its effort to bring the State Normal University to itself, but contributed its able and devoted principal to the general welfare. Under the vigorous administration of President Hovey, the State Normal University, in 1858, found itself in possession of the most conspicuous normal-school building then in the Union, erected at a cost of $150,000, combining the arrangements for a State university and normal seminary of the first class. The first report of the new president was a document of unusual ability, both in its pedagogic and administrative suggestions. His career as educator was interrupted by the call of patriotism. He organized a regiment from the students and teachers of the university, and served with distinction in the Union Army, till disabled by wounds for further service in the war.

But his place at Bloomington was at once taken by an educator whose services have been conspicuous during the entire generation subsequent to the civil war. Mr. Richard Edwards was born in Massachusetts in 1822. At the age of 10 he was taken by his father, a mechanic in humble circumstances, to northern Ohio, where, until the age of 21, he worked as farmer and house carpenter, with only the education of the common school of the period. At 21 he became a country district school-teacher at $11 a month and "board round." Hearing of the Massachusetts normal schools, he made his way to that State, and by the aid of Rev. Samuel J. May and President Nicholas Tillinghast, then at the head of the Lexington and Bridgewater normal schools, he entered the latter, where he attended to his studies, with schoolmastering during vacations. A year at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at Troy, N. Y., and a term of service as civil engineer in Boston were followed by his appointment as assistant in the State Normal School at Bridgewater, Mass., where he spent five years of arduous labor through the declining health of President Tillinghast. In 1854 he was appointed to the presidency of the new State Normal School for Girls at Salem, Mass., and in 1857 was invited to St. Louis, Mo., to take in charge the new City Training School for Teachers. Leaving this position, in 1861 he accepted an invitation to the place made vacant by President Hovey, and remained in Bloomington at the head of the State University of Illinois during the civil war. He became president of the State Teachers' Association; was everywhere welcomed as a lecturer on education; edited the Illinois Teacher, and was the author of a series of school books. In 1863 he received an honorary degree from Harvard College. By the loss of the State University fund of Illinois, the normal seminary at first was dedicated as a State university. But the reception of the agricultural and mechanical land fund from Congress in 1862 enabled the Commonwealth to establish the important State University at Champaign. The subsequent history of Dr. Edwards and the

Normal University of Illinois was prolonged until the later period of the great revival of public education that followed the auspicious close of the civil war.

Only the limitation of space thrown around an essay of the present character prevents the further commemoration of others of the faithful leaders of education, men and women, who, during the period now under consideration, 18301855, bravely fought the battle against the indifference and open hostility of opponents and lifted it through every grade to the conspicuous place it occupied at the close of this period. The State of Illinois owes much to the labors of its teachers and educators in the creation of the powerful and intelligent educational public that achieved the remarkable results for universal education through the memorable decade from 1850 to 1860.

MICHIGAN.

The movement known as the great revival of the American common school originated in New England early in the decade 1830-1840, and was especially influential in this northeastern group of common-school States, under the remarkable leadership of Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and others only less celebrated as educators and publicists. Outside of New England its more immediate results were felt at first in the western portion of New York, largely settled from New Eng-land and dominated by the common-school sentiment of the old Northeast. Mov ing westward on the lines of latitude which have indicated the dominating influence of the New England occupation and ideas, it became a powerful agency in the somewhat tardy development of the American system of universal education in the then original States of the Northwest Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. But in all these new Commonwealths the reform was greatly hindered by their mixture of population; especially the great number of people who occupied their southern counties, coming from States where the common school did not then exist, and the great educational revival was to be postponed for another generation. The history of these States, with that of the central Commonwealths-Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware-has already shown the influence of these elements of reaction in the very gradual way by which their present systems of public instruction were wrought out.

But it was the great good fortune of one State of the Northwest-Michiganthat its birthday fell upon the year ever memorable for the establishment of the Massachusetts board of education and the appointment of Horace Mann as its secretary. The Territory of Michigan, unlike all the vast area of the Northwest east of the Mississippi, since the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, dates from 1805. Its development was retarded by the almost inaccessible character of the far-off country, and the original settlement by a peculiar people from the Canadian French element, and by an almost constant warfare with the Indian tribes, until the close of the war of 1812-1814. In 1817, when Lewis Cass was appointed governor, the Territory had but 6,000 people, and Detroit was only a village.

Indeed, it was not until the opening of the New York and Erie Canal, in 1826, and the subsequent establishment of steam navigation between Buffalo and Detroit, that the great wave of immigration from the old East, which had already made New York west of Utica a new New England and given a definite character to northern Ohio, surged in. It was only in 1825 that the State was divided into townships. By 1830 Michigan had a population of 32,000, and in 1837 of 212,000, scattered over a territory of 58,915 square miles, largely a wilderness of heavily timbered and swamp lands, its wonderful mineral region still in hiding along the shores of its great northern lakes. At the admission of the State to the Union, at this date, Detroit had 8,000 people and there were half a dozen growing towns, like Ann Arbor, Marshall, Monroe, and Ypsilanti, while it was still believed that