The constitution of both of these committees is such that they would favor the distribution of standards of time according to any such scheme as the preceding rather than the distribution of a single time from the Naval Observatory. The above scheme, in the opinion of those who have given most thought to the subject, is the best one so far presented. It was due originally to Professor Benjamin Peirce, and its great merit consists in there being no greater difference than half an hour in any part of the country between the true local time and the arbitrary standard-an amount but slightly greater than exists between Greenwich and the west of England. In passing from the Ohio into the Mississippi Valley, for instance, the traveler merely changes his watch by one hour; and the merchant, remembering that Pacific time is three hours slow of Atlantic time, knows that it is half-past two in San Francisco when it is half-past five in New York.

Any scheme which proposes the adoption of a uniform time from one extremity of the country to the other must be looked upon as chimerical for a century to come. Ten o'clock in the morning at once conveys to our minds an idea of the average occupation of our people at that time; it is associated with a certain brightness of daylight; it means that the working-classes have been occupied with their daily task about three hours; we expect to find the majority of banks and shops open; and any disturbance of these traditional times would be received with marked disfavor. To learn, for

instance, from the morning paper that a distinguished public man had arrived in San Francisco late in the evening, and, fatigued with his journey, had retired at seven o'clock, would give the Eastern reader a sense of the utter strangeness of keeping a time three hours different from local time.

Any action for the establishment of standards of time over the country must begin by securing the active coöperation of the telegraph companies. The most influential of these companies has been traditionally public-spirited in allowing the use of its wires for scientific purposes, often at considerable expense to itself. The service of transmitting time occupies at present such an extremely small proportion of its ordinary business that the company has not as yet an officer of its service empowered to carry out the details necessary for such time-distributions as have been already discussed. If, however, the committees referred to could prepare a scheme that was thoroughly practical, and agree upon a uniformity of details which should not seriously interfere with the ordinary business of this or any other company, it is believed that the company would find it to their own interest to establish a regular system of procedure to govern their action in the case of observatories in different parts of the country which desire to secure their services in transmitting time-signals. In consideration of the assumption of responsibility and the efforts at introduction made by the observatory, the company would probably be found willing to so adjust their charges that it would prove to be entirely practicable for the various observatories to secure a large patronage for the services emanating from them without the financial burden seeming an undue amount.

LEONARD WALDO.

THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL FAILURE.

THERE is probably not one of those various social contrivances, political engines, or modes of common action called institutions which are regarded as characteristic of the United States, if not peculiar to them, in which the people of this country have placed more confidence, or felt greater pride, than its public-school system. There is not one of them so unworthy of either confidence or pride; not one which has failed so completely to accomplish the end for which it was established. And the case is worse than that of mere failure; for the result has been deplorable, and threatens to be disastrous.

To those who have not thought upon this subject, or who have thought upon it vaguely, and without careful and considerate observation of all the facts which bear upon it, this assertion will savor strongly of temerity and folly. The belief that education-meaning thereby the acquiring of such knowledge as can be got in schools and from books—is in itself elevating and purifying, and is the most potent agency in the formation of good men and good citizens, is so general and so plausible, that it has been assumed as an axiom in that which, for reasons that do not yet quite clearly appear, has come to be called "social science." If this assumed axiom were well founded, if it were really true that book-learning and thrift, decency of life, and good citizenship, are so directly connected that they must always be found together, it need hardly be said that this sort of education would be of the first necessity in every wisely constructed and well-ordered society, and would be of supreme necessity in a country in which every man who lives outside of prison walls has a voice in the government. Hence, the assumption on this point being what it is and has been for many generations, it would be strange indeed if public education had not been a subject of grave consideration early in the short history of the United States,

and if it had not been amply provided for by legislation. The provision was early made; and public education at public cost has been so general here, and has been developed into a system so vast and so complete, that a better opportunity for testing its worth could not be hoped for. The conditions, too, under which this system has been in operation are singularly favorable. The wealth of the country, its vast expanse of uncultivated, unoccupied land, a homestead in which can be acquired at an almost nominal price, the general intelligence of the people, their freedom from burdensome taxation, the absence of privileged classes and of an established religion supported by the state, make its people one upon which education, according to the assumed theory, should have the happiest, the most benign effects. But, however great may be the intrinsic value of education as a formative social agency, the effect of that which is afforded by our public-school system has proved in every way unsatisfactory and worse than unsatisfactory.

That the system is of New England origin need hardly be said. It is a development of the New England common school, from which it has been gradually evolved under gradually accumulating influences, some of which were pure and philanthropic, but other some of which were corrupt and self-seeking. The former may be called social; the latter political-using the word in that narrow and derogatory sense which it has unhappily acquired in our discussions of public affairs. In Massachusetts, in the year 1647, and in Connecticut only three years later, it was enacted that every township of fifty householders should appoint a person within their town to teach all children that should resort to him to write and read, whose wages should be paid by either the parents or the masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general; and it was also ordered that, in every town of one hundred families, there should be a grammar-school set up, the masters of which should be able to fit youths for the university; a grammar-school being then a school for instruction in the Latin language; English grammar and the teaching of it to English-speaking children remaining yet unimagined, and to men of that time almost unimaginable. This system of compulsory support of common schools and grammarschools spread itself over all New England and throughout those Northern and Western States which were more or less under New England influence.

The history of public education in the city of New York is of such importance as to merit special although brief consideration.

The act establishing common schools in the State of New York was passed in 1812. Before that time money was expended by the State for the encouragement and support of schools; but there was no public-school system. The law of 1812 applied to towns and villages, but not to chartered cities, with two or three specified exceptions. New York was not one of these. Public education in that city was in the hands of the Public-School Society, a voluntary association, chartered, and in its standing and motives something like the New York City Hospital. I have not been able, in the time that I could give to this subject, to find the act incorporating this benevolent society; but I find so early as the year 1807 an act for its benefit, of which the preamble is as follows:

Whereas, The trustees of the Society for establishing a Free School in the City of New York, for the education of such poor children as do not belong to or are not provided for by any religious society, have by their memorial solicited the aid of the Legislature; and whereas, their plan of extending the benefits of education to poor children, and the excellent mode of instruction adopted by them, are largely deserving the encouragement of government: therefore," etc.

This makes the original purpose of common-school education in the city of New York sufficiently clear. It was intended for poor children whose education was not provided for by any religious society. But, in fact, its benefits were gradually extended to others -children not at all dependent upon charity. The character, the spirit, and the purpose of the Society remained, however, unchanged. It sought to give elementary instruction and moral training to children who would otherwise have been more or less neglected in these respects. The benefits of a corresponding plan of education were conferred upon the people of the State at large by the law of 1812, which established a common-school system of a somewhat rudimentary nature; but the city of New York remained without provision by law for public education until the year 1842, when the Legislature passed an act extending to the city a participation in the system which prevailed in the State. But the act not only did this, it placed the schools of the Public-School Society, with those of the Orphan Asylum, of the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, and of several other benevolent societies, under the jurisdiction and supervision of the Board of Education. Finding themselves in this position, the corporators of the Public-School Society transferred their schoolhouses, and all their other property, with their rights, to the Board of Education, and the Society ceased to exist. It was not VOL. CXXXI.--NO. 289.

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