UC-NRLF 
 
 CO 
 
 CO 
 CO 
 
George Davidson 
 
UNIVERSITY OR1TION 
 
 BY 
 
 Hon. WM. G. I HAMMOND, LL. D 
 
 DELIVERED AT 
 
 THE COMMENCEMENT 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UxivKRsrrv OK I<>\v,\ 
 
 JUflE 17th, 1890 
 
 : 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION, 
 
 UNIYERSITY ORflTION 
 
 BY 
 
 Hon. WM. G. HAMMOND, LL. D, 
 
 11 
 
 DELIVERED AT 
 
 THE COMMENCEMENT 
 
 OF THE 
 
 TATE UNIVERSITY OK IOWA, 
 
 JUflE 17th, 189O. 
 
Republican Company, 
 
 Printers und Binders, 
 
 Iowa City, Iowa. 
 
r 
 
 Public Education. 
 
 N the history of human civilization there are two periods so far sur- 
 passing others that students who desire to measure man's capacity 
 for improvement, or to derive instruction for the future, may well 
 be excused for neglecting all the rest. So far indeed as our own Aryan 
 branch of the race is concerned there are no others. Whatever anti- 
 quarian research may have shown, or may yet show us, of Chinese or 
 Egyptian wisdom, or of the still more ancient "empires that sit in sullen - 
 ness and gloom," buried beneath the waves of oblivion as deeply as the 
 fabled Atlantis lies beneath the ocean traversed by the iron steamship 
 of to-day, yet none of their lessons can have for us the value of those 
 we draw from these two periods. The earlier is that which men for 
 centuries (and ever since modern life has been able to feel and appreciate 
 its matchless charm) have agreed to call the classic age: the age in which 
 the individual man seemed to attain his highest development as a model 
 and canon for all af tertime as delicate as the the Greek chisel, as strong 
 as the Roman sword; profound in speculative thought as Plato, wide and 
 exact in objective knowledge as Aristotle; embodying the most subtle 
 moods and tenses of human thought in the infinite variety yet constant 
 unity of a Greek verb, or sternly governing human action and human 
 passion by the written reason of Roman law. 
 
 The later period dawned upon the dark ages when from feudalism as 
 a stern father, and the Christian church as a cherishing mother, sprang the 
 modern state which has made possible for us all the material prosperity 
 of the present day. But its conquest of the external world is only the 
 result of ttyat strength of united action, that power of combination, which 
 springs from the due order of relations among individuals, that perfect 
 adjustment of legal rights and legal duties found in the "due pro- 
 cess of law," Perhaps it has raised the individual little if any beyond the 
 classic standard. We hear frequent complaints that it has not made him 
 love his brother as himself. Everybody feels keenly that it has not made 
 others eager to subordinate their own interests to his, or sacrifice them- 
 selves to himself. But in the failure of this ethical ideal it is a great 
 satisfaction to know that it has at least saved the weak from the tyranny 
 of the strong, and guarded the simple from the snares of the shrewd, by 
 
 M290681 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 making them equal before the law; and has done what it can to prevent 
 the most highly developed and highly cultured individual from keeping 
 his brother beneath his feet, as he did without let or hindrance, in the 
 classic age. 
 
 I know it has often been said that the ancient state was elaborated at 
 the expense of the individual, and that personal freedom and personal 
 development are the achievement of modern times. As we have taken 
 the word polity from the Greeks, it has been assumed that with it we 
 have learned of them all we know of. politics: and that their chief lesson 
 to us has been that of merging the man in the state, and perfecting the 
 organization of the latter. 
 
 In part I believe this view to be a mistaken one; but in larger part I 
 admit it to be true, yet not inconsistent with what I have said before, 
 that individual men reached almost their highest development in Greece 
 and Rome, while the nice adjustment of their reciprocal rights and duties 
 has been the work of modern times. 
 
 Undoubtedly the city-state was strong, almost tyrannical in its control 
 of the citizen,in the classical period though perhaps less so in reality than 
 in the theoretic republic of Plato, and the hardly less fanciful constitution 
 as described to us by foreigners, of Sparta. No modern state or king 
 would dare to disregard the vested rights or the personal freedom of its 
 subjects,as the fickle demos of Athens often did. But this was not through 
 the perfection of its polity: it was rather the brute strength of the mob. 
 It differed from modern constitutional government as the will of the 
 master over the slave differs from the contract between employer and 
 employed. The one is the first crude attempt at social order, the other 
 its advanced product; and as slavery bears hard on the masses, while 
 allowing the favorites to become the companions, equals, even masters of 
 their owners, so in this crude and arbitrary form of polity the leading 
 citizen, the rich man, the popular orator or the favorite sophist, had 
 chances of individual development that could never be shared by a whole 
 community of freemen. As Plato rises grandly to overshadow modem 
 thinkers as the thunders of Demosthenes, even now reverberating in the 
 echoes of two thousand years, drown the voice of every modern orator 
 so, too, we look in vain among modern millionaires, in the House of 
 Lords or in our own Senate, for a figure so splendid as Pericles, and the 
 finest of our gilded youth seem mere gilded counterfeits beside the 
 brillianc Alcibiades. Even in those fields of action where modern inven- 
 tions have given us so great an advantage, as in warfare, have we a 
 modern general or field-marshal to place above the young Greek volun- 
 teer who came out of the ranks to save his 10,000 companions in their 
 darkest despair, and led them through a hostile empire and over all the 
 opposition of the great King to the spot where their glad eyes again beheld 
 home, safety, all that life held dear, in the dancing waves of their own 
 sea Thalatta! Or to crown all with a single instance, study Caius Julius 
 Crcsar, in all the details of his brief life, as calmly and critically as you 
 can the politician, the man of pleasure, the augur, the consul, the 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 general, the conqueror of Gaul, the moulder of the empire, the reformer 
 of the world's calendar and of the Roman law, the orator, the historian 
 measure him as closely as you can in all these characters, and then, if you 
 can, match him! The first emperor of Rome and of the world, it was his 
 brilliant personality that converted the common title of a military com- 
 mander into the proper designation of the highest civil dominion over 
 men and kings. By a singular coincidence he was also the last of those 
 whose private family name became the title of his successor. That this 
 was a common practice in the early ages may be inferred from many 
 instances, such as that of the Pharaohs of Egypt. I know of no other 
 modern example but this. When man's aspirations for a universal 
 monarchy came nearest totalization in the Holy Roman Empire of the 
 middle ages, they called the monarch of all Christian men, by his name, 
 pronounced if not spelled, as he probably spoke it; and to-day each 
 European monarch that claims to be a king of kings, preeminent even 
 among the rulers of the earth, is proud to name himself a Kaiser. 
 
 On the other hand, the surpassing excellence of the modern state 
 seems to me to lie, not in its absorption of the individual, but in the full 
 and equal development of individual characters combined with the widest 
 variety of relations between them, and the most delicate adjustment of 
 their mutual rights and duties. In all classic antiquity, even in Roman 
 law, I find nothing to equal the definition of civil liberty, not yet a 
 century old, as freedom to do all that is consistent with an equal freedom 
 on the part of every fellow-citizen. At once a scientific definition and a 
 practical test, it applies to all concrete rights with the flexibility of an 
 algebraic formula: it measures every object of a legal right or legal duty 
 like one of those great balances that can weigh a ship and her cargo, or 
 turn with every drop of the water she displaces. Compare it with the 
 maxims so often repeated to-day, as if their classic authors had uttered 
 the last word of wisdom on this head two thousand years ago. "So use 
 your own rights as not to injure others." "He who is usinghis own right 
 cannot be injuring another." Unquestionably one of these is a charm- 
 ing piece of erudition especially when quoted in the original to 
 adorn a decision for the plaintiff; and the other is equally so when 
 the decision is for the defendant. But what help does either or both give 
 until you have determined what is the. right, or what is the wrong. 
 
 Do not understand me in this as claiming pert'ectness for modern law 
 or infallibility for those who dispense it. No one will admit its imper- 
 fections more candidly than those who know it best. Ask the judge, 
 who for almost a life-time has given to its administration the powers of 
 one of the soundest of human intellects, and a conscience as spotless as 
 ever ruled a human breast. Ask the eminent counsel, whose deep learn- 
 ing has never been prostituted to an unworthy call. I appeal to them 
 for the weight their testimony will lend. But perhaps no man can feel 
 the mistakes and imperfections of the law more profoundly than one whose 
 humbler task it has been for years to repeat to beginners the mere A. B. 
 C., the fundamental lessons what should be the primary truths of the 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 law. He will never claim for it infallibility. But if he knows anything of 
 its history for the seven or eight centuries of its modern life, he will tell 
 you that it has constantly been enlarging its beneficial influence over 
 human actions, and the reciprocal powers of every man over the conduct 
 of his fellows. It has enabled him to claim at first safety from wanton 
 attack on person or property then from fraudulent injury under a 
 specious guise then care and diligence to avoid even indirect harm to 
 one's neighbor and at last self-restraint and watchful forethought in 
 the use of his own possessions lest he endanger that neighbor in the like 
 or equal use. Even the mistakes and fictions of modern law seem to 
 have tended, or to have been over-ruled to the same end. The confusion 
 of law and ethics under the name of the Law of Nature, and its antag- 
 onist theory of the social compact were alike herein. In this respect, at 
 least, the merit of the latter lay in its baseless and visionary nature. No 
 man could prove the terms of that original contract, for no man could 
 prove its existence. Hence every generation was free to restate these 
 terms for itself in accordance with its highest conception of social order 
 and man's nature and destiny. It constantly led them to a higher ideal 
 while the patriarchal theory, as then understood, perpetuated primitive 
 tyranny. Something of the same character has descended from the 
 social compact to its offspring, the implied contract of modern English 
 law. New duties of man to man, almost numberless, have become legal- 
 ly enf orcible by the beneficient fiction that one shall be supposed to have 
 agreed to do whatever injustice or right he equitably should do for an- 
 other. 
 
 I have dwelt so long on the contrast of these two great periods that I 
 have left myself scant time for the main purpose of my inquiry the 
 causes of that difference. I say causes, for they are many. The great 
 phenomena of history are too complex to be traced to a single or a 
 simple origin. We have had indeed a pseudo philosophy of history that 
 loves to fix attention on some trivial fact in the past, and say, Lo! if this 
 had happened otherwise, all after history had been different! As when 
 Sir Francis Palgrave gravely tells us that if Duke Richard, of Normandy, 
 had not one fine morning happened to see the baker's daughter, Arlotta, 
 washing her feet in a brook, there would have been no William the Con- 
 queror, and therefore no Norman- Conquest, no Magna Charta, no 
 modern England. Such "philosophical reflections" are the merest tricks 
 of an artificial rhetoric. No human intellect can compute the number of 
 infinitessimal changes of person and detail that might have taken place 
 at every step of the long pilgrimage of the race from savagery to civiliza- 
 tion, without changing the order of the march or the regular develop- 
 ment of each event in it from all that preceded. It is only the inter- 
 weaving of many causes to produce each single result, the effect of a 
 single causation upon many and unlike events, that prevents us from 
 tracing these grand laws of human evolution upon which individuals 
 and single facts have as little influence as the pieces on the chess board 
 have upon the brain that orders the game. Men are nothing but pawns; 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 the world, the moral universe as well as the physical is governed by 
 eternal law. We can only read that law in history, as we read the com- 
 mon law in its past decisions, which have .the same weight whether it is 
 John Doe or John Jacob Astor that is party to the record. So too, in the 
 great laws that rule all history, as in common law of the courts, it is not 
 the law itself that we read, but only its reflection in facts: held-, that on 
 such and such antecedents the law ordains such a consequence; the 
 mighty, unwritten law that so ordains and "holds," no human tongue 
 can formulate with authority. (Forgive me if I seem to carry out the 
 comparison with professional pedantry. I do it because I believe it to 
 be true. You who are to deal with the common law in its most practi- 
 cal and narrowest sense, will do your work better and far more intelli- 
 gently, if you take with you the conviction that its methods and author- 
 ities are those of all human reasoning on abstract subjects, and that 
 courts and judges do not make the law.) 
 
 Hence it is only by a large abstraction that we can say of any great 
 event or any great phenomenon of life that it is caused by any other. 
 This, working in unison with all contemporary causes, has produced, 
 among all future phenomena, influenced by it, in a special and evident 
 line of causation, that. It is only in this carefully guarded manner that I 
 venture to state the two propositions to which at last I ask your atten- 
 tion as the end and purpose of all I have to say: 
 
 First, that the peculiar feature of modern civilization which I have 
 tried to point out, the mutual control of the fellow members of society 
 over each other's conduct, for the welfare and happiness of all, by law in 
 the form of reciprocal rights and duties, is the result, in large 
 measure perhaps we may even say in the largest measure of another 
 factor of modern civilization, i. e., public education. 
 
 And second, that public education unknown to the ancient world, be- 
 gan with, has always been rooted in, and must live or die, flourish or de- 
 cline with the University. 
 
 Public education does not necessarily mean free schools; though of all 
 the senses we Americans attach to the word liberty, there is none more 
 precious than the freedom of the poorest child in the land to enter the 
 school house without a fee to teacher or to district. I hope the time is 
 coming when every boy and girl of Iowa may come as a right to the 
 highest school in the State, and to all its departments. But I must add 
 that if to-day some fairy could give me the needful power, and the 
 needful wisdom, to make of the whole educational system what it should 
 be, I think there are other tasks that would claim the first place, rather 
 than a mere abolition of tuition fees. In one sense, this and most of 
 our western schools, are free already. Every young man or young woman 
 who is thoroughly in earnest to get an education, can earn in a moderate 
 time the money necessary to take their course throughout. I have my- 
 self known not a few that did it; and knowing what men and women, 
 what lawyers, and physicians and teachers and engineers, they have 
 made of themselves by their patience and industry and persistence of pur- 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 pose, I am not sure but they are better off for the obstacles they have 
 surmounted: obstacles that would have deterred weaker men, such as I 
 have known elsewhere tempted into a profession for which they have no 
 real fitness, by the mistaken kindness of parents or the largess of some 
 society or fund. 
 
 The education here given is public even now in the most important 
 sense; it is supplied mainly at the cost of the entire public, with no im- 
 plied contract for the maintenance of any party, creed or section; and it 
 is open to all alike as a means of direct preparation for their work in 
 life, as chosen by their own free will, uninlluenced by their teachers. 
 Perhaps we hardly appreciate the value of this, since it has become the 
 dominant idea of higher education in this country. To know what an ad- 
 vance is already made, will require some comparison with the ages in 
 which it was unknown. 
 
 Those of you who recall Macaulay's brilliant sketch of the education 
 furnished by the daily life of Athens, may think 1 am unjust to the 
 classic age when I call public education an innovation of modern life. 
 But one needs to penetrate little beneath the surface, to see that ancient 
 instruction was always in the hands of a small and privileged class, who 
 sought to perpetuate their own caste and privileges rather than to diffuse 
 the light of education as widely as possible; and further, that its method 
 invariably was to transmit to pupils what the teacher thought it need- 
 ful or advantageous for them to learn, instead of opening wide the doors 
 of knowledge, and prompting all who came to enter for themselves and 
 appropriate all they could seize and master for their own advancement 
 in learning and in active life. It is in the absence of these two elements 
 of genuine education that I find the difference of which I have already 
 said so much. 
 
 So far as 1 know there is no trace in all ancient history, of one people's 
 having studied the language or literature of another as a means of edu- 
 cation. The Greeks were not likely to hold in such esteem the jargon of 
 barbarians. Even the singular interest of Herodotus in Egyptian cus- 
 toms may have given him the reputation of a mere collector of foreign 
 fables which has always clung to him until modern students have per- 
 ceived the true value of his matter. If there is an exception to this 
 narrow contempt of all foreign culture, it is the Roman affectation of 
 Greek thoughts and phrases; and even that seems to have been the mark 
 of a small coterie whom their contemporaries regarded much as Chaucer 
 did the Abbess's affectation of French "after the schole of Stratford atte 
 Bowe." Of real linguistic and critical study, of world-culture, as the 
 Germans say, there is not even a germ traceable anywhere till the re- 
 vival of letters and of Greek came together in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries three hundred years after the rise of the first great Univer- 
 sity at Bologna. 
 
 Wherever we find anything that can be called systematic education in 
 the ancient world that is, anything beyond the mere training of children 
 in the necessary arts of life, such as even the beasts and birds give to 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 
 their young it is invariably the privilege of a small and chosen class. 
 What is still more significant it consists in the imparting to these of a 
 body of traditional learning their formation by the hands and uniler" 
 the arbitrary direction of the teachers. Thus "the wisdom of the 
 Egyptians" was confined with jealous care to the close corporation of 
 the priesthood. So it was apparently with the Eastern magi, while 
 even the sons of the nobles had to be content with a course that taught 
 them only "to ride, to draw the bow and to speak the truth!" Pythagoras 
 .and all the sages of Greece taught their most important lessons only to 
 an esoteric circle, and the sophists, to the sons of the wealthy. The chief 
 offense of Socrates against the orthodoxy of his age seems to have been 
 in his method of instructing any youth of bright parts whom he met in 
 his walks, though even he made no effort to educate youth in general. 
 In Rome, everything that we should call professional education, was 
 long the secret of the patricians. From them it passed to be the preroga- 
 tive of the rich. It is not inconsistant with this though it sounds to 
 modern ears like a paradox that the best educated men and the 
 teachers of rich men's sons were often themselves slaves. It would have 
 been a much greater wonder if a poor freeman had ever had a chance to 
 get an education ; but we hear of not a single instance. The rich knight 
 or Senator could buy education in a slave if a father's care had not be- 
 stowed it on him, or his own caprice or stupidity had refused it. In 
 either case knowledge was in safe hands, conservative hands, not likely 
 to peril the established order of things by innovations. Had a bright 
 proletarius had the opportunity to acquire it, he might have discovered 
 something new and thus periled the established order. But naturally the 
 proletariat was content with panem et cir census. When the Western 
 Empire went down like a huge ship, foundering beneath the waves of 
 barbarism, much of this traditional learning disappeared with it, only to 
 be recovered centuries afterward, as men find gold and jewels in the 
 wreck of some Spanish galleon long at the bottom of the sea. But its 
 methods were perpetuated through the Dark Ages by the church aided 
 by princes like Charlemagne and Alfred. These did their best to in- 
 struct in the traditional learning the rude races that had become domi- 
 nant in Western Europe. After a time, every royal palace and every 
 bishop's seat had its school, teaching the trivium and the quadrivium 
 after the most approved methods. The clergy seem to have been 
 specially active in gathering into these schools the brightest minds they 
 could find and instructing them in all that they themselves knew. They 
 succeeded in making Latin the language of the Roman church, the 
 tongue of all educated men. Their methods of instruction were prob- 
 ably little if any inferior to those of their predecessors in the classic 
 times. They had a new race to deal with, rude and uncultivated, but 
 eager, ambitious and capable. Single minds like Eginhard, Alcuin, Eri- 
 gena, Lanfranc, arose to show that the capacity of the old method for 
 training the individual, was not yet entirely effete. Each episcopal 
 school had no doubt its group of these, that never attained posthumous 
 
10 PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 celebrity. But they failed to make any lasting impression on the great 
 mass, or even on the most active leading minds of the class that 
 governed the world. They added nothing to the traditional stock of 
 knowledge and aroused no fresh desire for it. The vast majority of men 
 had never known that desire, even in the classic age. The church ab- 
 sorbed and satisfied all who might have continued the higher cultivation 
 of Greece and Rome. The most active and ambitious minds found in 
 that cultivation nothing to their purpose and neglected it. 
 
 We are accustomed to think of the Dark Ages as a time of mere 
 eclipse, when the lights that had previously illuminated the world were 
 darkened for six or eight centuries, only to shine out afterward with 
 increased lustre. We thus leave out of view an important fact: that in 
 many regions of Europe where the former light shone with greatest 
 lustre it went out then never to be rekindled; and that the provinces where 
 the newer light shines brightest now are those least brilliant in the earlier 
 time. What has become of the eastern half of the empire which makes 
 such a figure just before its decline? These were prosperous, wealthy, 
 enlightened countries, while Gaul and Britain were scarcely out of 
 barbarism. The entire southern coast of the Mediterranean was civilized 
 as early as Italy itself. All felt the Dark Ages alike, but these never saw 
 the sun of civilization rise again. It was not a mere eclipse, but rather 
 the waning of an ancient luminary, the rise of a new. The old slowly 
 expired under the bushel of the church. The new was set upon a mighty 
 candlestick, as new as itself, called university, 
 
 The twelfth century was not a favorable period for literary activity 
 or improvements in the science of education. Even the bishops and 
 clergy were too busy in the great contest for supremacy between church 
 and state to pay much attention to improvements in the trivium, or what 
 we should call new theories of normal instruction. It was a period of 
 "storm and stress" in which men were busy with the most practical 
 questions how each should save himself and his possessions from 
 violence; how neighbors should live together in peace and security, yet 
 without giving themselves up to the tender mercy of lords, feudal or 
 clerical. The descendants of the northern barbarians who had never 
 known a master, and those of the Roman provincials who had never 
 lived free from a master, were seeking some common ground on which 
 they could meet with equal rights. Moreover, Europe was full of young, 
 strong and ambitious men, who sought a career, but could find it neither 
 in brutal fights nor in the church. Among these, somehow, the news got 
 abroad that an obscure teacher of rhetoric, in Italy, had turned up some 
 volumes of the musty Roman law to find good rhetorical exercises for his 
 pupils, and had got them so much interested in it, that he had under- 
 taken to explain the hard words, and let them write down the explana- 
 tion between the lines. It was not the first attempt to teach law, for the 
 Lombard law had been glossed and taught for a century at Pavia. But 
 that had never interested anybody but Lombards, and the thought of 
 studying a foreign law for its scientific value was as yet to come. The 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. II 
 
 ancient Eoman law was quite a different thing. The glamour of the 
 Roman name was still powerful. The Roman empire was the one great 
 successful state of which their histories told. Charlemagne, and~lhe 
 emperor of all Christian men, the only potentate that stood on a level with 
 the Pope, still claimed authority as heirs of that empire. One could read 
 a text of its law to a bishop or to a feudal lord with some hope of over- 
 awing his caprice. Even the monk Gratian had collected the Canon law 
 of the church in imitation of it, and Obertus de Orto and Gerardus Niger, 
 the authors of the Law of Feuds, had admitted its authority. The Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury himself had brought home from Italy a young man 
 who knew all about the Code and Pandects, to help him in his own law- 
 suits with the papal legate, the king's brother. 
 
 According to the realistic belief of that age there could be but one true 
 science of law, as of mathematics or astronomy. Every country might 
 have its customs, differing like its climate, but this was universal truth, 
 that could be learned in Italy as well as at home, and having been learned 
 in Italy, could be put to practical uses at home. Hence aspiring young 
 men from all Europe took the road to Bologna by thousands. Very 
 possibly they went in greater numbers because no preparatory course in 
 the Bishop's school was necessary. Nobody asked whether they had 
 gone through thetriviam or thequadrivium any more than whether they 
 were orthodox or heretical, rich or poor; to the great scandal and regret 
 of all experienced educators of the old school. Soon they were there in 
 such numbers that some kind of school government was necessary. They 
 elected a rector or president out of their own number, and made a set of 
 college laws for themselves. They organized themselves into clubs called 
 nations because each comprised all of a certain nationality. Finally the 
 Pope was induced to give them the power of self-government by erecting 
 them into a corporation or university. That was the meaning of the 
 name which had nothing to do with the number of branches taught. The 
 fiction that a university is so called because it teaches universal knowl- 
 edge, or that the name has any connection whatever with the course of 
 study, is of much later origin. The citizens of Bologna found it a good 
 thing to feed them, let lodgings to them, etc. Probably they had a good 
 influence on the price of house rent and vacant lots in Bologna. Conse- 
 quently Pavia, Florence and other cities, soon had universities of their 
 own; and popular lecturers, who could draw many students, were 
 salaried from the public treasury, as a good way of reducing the city 
 taxes. 
 
 It would take far too long to describe the extension of universities in 
 Europe to Paris, Montpelier, Oxford, Prague, Heidelberg, etc., or even 
 the extension of the system to other branches of learning, as medicine, 
 theology, or the humanities. Salerno became famous for teaching 
 medicine. Others were popular now with one class of students, now 
 with another, as different professors came and went. But all were public 
 schools in the sense that they opened their doors to all comers who 
 sought to study in them; and that the vast majority of those who came 
 
12 PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 to them came to prepare themselves in one way or another for active 
 life,to make their way in the world; and whatever else they learned there, 
 they learned the art of living in the world on equal terms with their 
 fellows. The "dark ages," as modern pedantry still reckons them, were 
 not yet past. The "renaissance" of classic art and literature was yet far 
 in the future; but in these rude, ill-disciplined bands of professional 
 students a mob, rather than a well -organized and properly graded insti- 
 tution of learning, there was evolved for the first time the cardinal 
 principle of public education an education of the people, by the people, 
 for the people, if I may so use the words made classical by that great 
 American who was himself so grand an illustration of its central truth. 
 For this is, I take it, the central truth of public education as a modern 
 discovery unknown to the classic world: that the main factor in all true 
 education is the pupil, and not the teacher: that its courses, its methods, 
 its results, are shaped not by what the latter wishes to impart, but by 
 what the pupil wants and needs to learn; and that whatever the school 
 law or the college regulations may say, the real governance of the school 
 governance in the good old English and Roman sense of pilotage will 
 ever be with the learners and not the learned. Hence we see why this 
 new truth first was seen in the university, the school which comes most 
 immediately in contact with actual life, where it was easiest for all to 
 see the direct practical consequence of what they learned. Only by slow 
 degrees has it gone farther and mastered the intermediate and primary 
 schools more remote from that influence. It is the university that has 
 given us our common schools, and not vice versa-, for all public education 
 depends mainly on the students' sense of need to prepare for something 
 higher and beyond them. It is the university that has really given us 
 free schools; for there men first learned to consider education, not as a 
 privilege to be bestowed on those already favored beyond their fellows, 
 but as an equal right of all to the means of doing well whatever work in 
 life they had to do. It is the university that makes it worth while to 
 sustain them. 
 
 We are now all agreed even those who oppose anything higher, 
 that the State should secure to all its citizens a common English educa- 
 tion, the power to read and write, with the other branches taught in our 
 common schools. But how many go a step further and ask themselves 
 why ? In what consists the advantage to t/ie State of having all its citi- 
 zens able to read and write, instead of leaving them in the condition of 
 the laboring classes in many civilized countries the condition in which 
 the great mass of our own English forefathers were a very few centuries 
 ago, dependent on the parish priest and the schoolmaster for all the 
 reading and writing done in the community ? The English yeoman of 
 300 years ago, worked and fought as sturdily, ate as much, prayed and 
 praised God rather more, perhaps on the whole enjoyed this life as 
 much as his descendants and had at least as firm a faith in a better life 
 beyond. What have we gained by teaching him to read and write ? or to 
 anticipate the first answer, by increasing his intelligence V Surely all 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 this vast expenditure of our school system is not made merely for the 
 purpose of enabling a nation of men who can but just read and write, to 
 exchange their ideas on paper rather than by word of mouth; nor even 
 to enable them to read the newspapers. No man will see the truth of 
 this position, on its face, better than those it directly concerns. Go to 
 the farm-house and ask the plain sensible couple you will find there, 
 reading perhaps the Bible on Sunday, and the newspaper of a winter 
 evening, but working early and late, day after day, that their boys and 
 girls may go to school, and one or more of them to the Academy or Col- 
 legeask them if they would set such a value on their children's school- 
 ing, if the only use they were ever to make of it was to read the produc- 
 tions of other men no better educated than themselves, or write down 
 the same thoughts that prompt their daily speech V They see, they feel, 
 deeper than the Faculty of a University do, that the chief end and pur- 
 pose and value of reading is, that it enables us to learn from those who 
 are wiser and better than we are, but whom we never can hope to meet. 
 1 do not claim that universities have always been true to the theory of 
 public education any more than I would assert that they have adhered 
 to the simple organization of the twelfth century, or that university 
 men have always written just such books as pious parents would wish 
 their sons and daughters in the common school to read. It would have 
 been impossible to keep up so many great institutions for seven cen- 
 turies on the simple lines upon which the first universities were formed. 
 The most we can truthfully say is that wherever universities existed 
 public education was more widely diffused than where they were un- 
 known, and that they have never at the worst been so inaccessible to 
 the poor man's son as ancient schools, or so sterile of free thought as the 
 church schools of the dark ages. No doubt there came very soon a 
 strong reaction from the crude and simple methods of the primitive 
 university. Some institutions were founded by kings and bishops on 
 purpose to harness the new and untamed force and drive it in the reins 
 of established power, as in the case of Naples. The entire force of pro- 
 fessional teachers of the day was ready to help in the task. They pro- 
 foundly distrusted this new-fangled method of letting the young learn 
 what they felt the need of instead of pursuing the trivium and the 
 quadrivium. The old teacher almost inevitably becomes a conservative. 
 He has begun by teaching children to know the straight i and the 
 round o. Years of practice made him perfect in his art and his pride lies 
 in the symmetrical joining of the perfect circle until he forgets that the 
 perfectly rounded o of the school year marks only a cypher. The per- 
 fectly drilled pupil ends it at the very point where it began; the circle is 
 perfect, and empty. Too many of our most elaborate and be-lauded 
 school courses are typified by that beautifully rounded o and the 
 classes whose interest lies in keeping the great majority of mankind in a 
 perpetual tutelage, are always ready to help the instructor who can make 
 the roundest o's with the least in them. The more industrious and con- 
 scientious he is, the easier they find it to reduce his labor to that of 
 the mill-horse in his perpetual round. 
 
14 PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 More frequently perhaps the public university has been reduced to a 
 mere machine for moulding human clay into uniform bricks, by the 
 unconscious working of this conservative habit, strengthened by the in- 
 fluence of wealth. Oxford and Cambridge are noted examples. What 
 teacher in either has written a book for poor but earnest students since 
 Vacarius? The early divorce of its legal school from the practical 
 studies of the Inns of Court may largely account for this; and the 
 formation of that real university as Fortescue calls it, and as it was 
 for a time, may almost make us forgive it. 
 
 J do not name the great English universities in reproach or in for- 
 getfulness of the great services they have rendered to an important class 
 of English society; but only to illustrate the danger there has always 
 been and still is, wherever education is regarded as a private interest, 
 the particular prerogative of a rank, of a church, of an order of teachers, 
 of any body less than the whole community. For the same end I have 
 selected the term public education as most expressive of the advance 
 made in modern times and have tried to point out its character as a 
 public duty and public interest; duty to all that are to be active mem- 
 bers of the State, interest as preparing the way for that harmonious 
 play of reciprocal rights and duties among men, that is the characteristic 
 of modern civil liberty. Thus in a sense far higher than mere pecuniary 
 support or normal instruction, it is the proper work of the State. 
 
 I desire to see the responsibility of the State for public education 
 fully recognized, because I believe that in that way can the best interests 
 of such education be secured for the future, not for the next genera- 
 tion, not for the next century, but for the many centuries through which 
 as we may reasonably hope will extend the life of the State. Nothing is 
 better settled by experience than that our institutions for high- 
 er education must be permanent and enduring to do good work. 
 The best organization for the common school is simple and inexpensive; 
 it may even be the mere succession of "summer school" and "winter 
 school" in which so many millions of Americans have learned all they 
 know of book-learning, renewing its youth and ending its brief existence 
 with each recurring season. The High School demands more machinery, 
 teachers of more experience and longer consecutive terms, books, appa- 
 ratus arid other aids that cannot be renewed every year. Still the High 
 School may change completely with every set of youth that pass through 
 its course of three or four years and change for the better. Much of the 
 best work that has been done in our High Schools and Academies, has 
 been done by young men and women to whom the teacher's desk was 
 only a temporary station for a year or two, between the close of their 
 own instruction and the entrance upon active life. And so I believe it 
 will always be. Talk as we may about elevating and separating the 
 teachers' profession, I do not believe that we shall ever see our common 
 schools and High Schools all in the hands of life-long pro- 
 fessional teachers. Nor do I desire to see it, either for the sake of the 
 scholars or for that of the teachers themselves, to whom a year or 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION. 15 
 
 two of such experience is simply invaluable. But when we reach 
 the College, and still more the University, we find ourselves under 
 very different conditions. These cannot be created in a day or a year. 
 It is riot merely because the libraries, and cabinets, and laboratories, cost 
 very large sums of money ; it is not even because they must gather from 
 all parts of the country men learned and skillful, who have already spent 
 years in mastering their respective subjects, and who must be asked to 
 life-long positions if they are to be had at all; it is all this, but it is 
 something more than this that gives a great university that character, 
 that life of its own, which makes it an honor and a profit to be educated 
 there, and to carry away its diploma. A rich man may lavish his 
 millions upon a new-born college because, perhaps, its sponsers in bap- 
 tism have given his name to it; Uutit will be generations before its gradu- 
 ates go out from it with the feeling of love and gratitude and profound 
 respect with which middle-aged and grey-haired men all over this broad 
 land look back to the red brick walls and scanty appliances of some little 
 ill-provided New England college, whose hard-working, poorly-paid pro- 
 fessors, teach in the same rooms where he and they sat together as class- 
 mates many years ago, and whose noblest and best endowment is the 
 long roll of honored names that fill the many issues of the triennial cata- 
 logue. It is the old and hallowed associations of the name that make 
 them love to call Bowdoin or Dartmouth or Williams or Amherst by that 
 sweetest of all names, Alma Mater; and it is this reverence and affection 
 for the cherishing and cherished mother of our souls that forms one of the 
 best, if not the very best part, of a college education! How many 
 Americans there are who would feel that a great moral bulwark were 
 taken from their lives if Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton should close its 
 doors to-day! 
 
 But Oxford and Cambridge have shown us that there is no charm in 
 endowments to ensure good work for all time, or prevent the repetition 
 of a similar treason to public education in New England or any part of the 
 United States. If the oldest and proudest, the most venerated of Ameri- 
 can schools, become mere training schools for rich men's sons, whither 
 young men go to display what they are or have already, and not modest- 
 ly fit themselves to be something hereafter ; if their greatest fame is to be 
 found in the comic songs of a perambulatory quartette, or the "phenome- 
 nal kicker" of a foot-ball, or the pluck and bottom of a "varsity" crew- 
 then upon the names that educated Americans have loved the most must 
 be written "Upharsin!" and American public education must be found, 
 for all time to come, in the "plebeian universities," the "one-horse col- 
 leges" producing a score of graduates where the others have a hundred, 
 but every one of the score a man. But will you trust such sacred interests 
 as the education of each rising generation to the fickle will of the 
 populace? Are you not afraid that some coming Board of Regents, 
 some future Legislature, may be untrue to their great trust, may 
 "lower the standard," or "demoralize the tone," may admit free-thinking, 
 or may banish the classics? Yes, I can foresee all these dangers, and I 
 
1 6 PUBLIC EDUCATION. 
 
 should deprecate them. But I can see also that what may be lost or 
 lowered in one year may be restored and re-elevated in another that 
 there will not be that utter incapacity of renovation which seems to be 
 the characteristic of close corporations. And more than this, I can see 
 that institutions thus open to the influences of the time will have but one 
 danger to encounter, and not two. They may possibly feel the effect of 
 a changed standard of education and nothing can secure a school 
 against this, but they will not be in danger of being deserted entirely 
 by those for whom they were intended, as has happened to so many 
 endowed schools of the old world. It will do no good to keep up the 
 standard if there is no one to apply it to! The great merits of State pro- 
 vision for the education of its citizens is that it can never fall into the 
 clutches of private interests, or be made subservient to the prejudices of 
 a past age. With every new generation the power that controls it must 
 be renewed. There may be those who regard it as a benefit to our older 
 colleges that they are anchored fast to the creeds or the political princi- 
 ples of the 16th, the 17th, or the 18th century. I do not wish to discuss 
 the question whether these were better or worse than those of the 19th. 
 My position is that in either case this anchoring is a mistake. All edu- 
 cational institutions are only means for bringing the new generation to a 
 point where they may be of most service to their own contempararies, 
 To serve that end, they must go forward with the great stream of history. 
 The boat locked to the shore may be in a better or worse place than that 
 to which the stream would carry it. In either case it cannot serve the 
 purpose of him who would, him who must, by the law of his being 
 advance with the stream. 
 
Manufactured by 
 
 eAYLORD BROS. le. 
 
 Syracu, N. Y. 
 
 Stockton, Calif. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY