William T. Harris, the present United States commissioner of education, who was then superintendent of schools in St. Louis, had called attention to the kindergarten and suggested that experiments be made with a view to introducing into the public school such features of the system as might prove helpful in the education of children between the ages of four and six. The outcome of this suggestion was the opening of an experimental kindergarten in the fall of 1873. The work was approved by the school board; new kindergartens were opened as rapidly as competent directors could be prepared to take charge of them, and when Dr. Harris resigned his position as superintendent in 1880 the St. Louis kindergartens had an enrollment of 7,828 children and the system was so firmly established that it has since that time proved itself impregnable to all attack.

The experiment in St. Louis was a crucial one and had it failed it would have been difficult to prevail upon other cities to introduce the kindergarten into their public schools. There were many ready arguments against such an innovation: the argument from expense; the argument based on the tender age of kindergarten children; the argument that kindergartens would spoil the children and fill the primary grade with intractable pupils; the argument that only rarely endowed and, therefore, rarely to be found persons could successfully conduct a kindergarten. These arguments would have acquired irresistible force when confirmed by an abortive experiment. Dr. Harris steered the kindergarten cause through stormy waters to a safe harbor. He proved that the kindergarten could be made an integral part of the public school system. He reduced the annual expense to less than five dollars for each child. He called attention to the fact that the years between four and six were critical ones and that the needs of the child at this period were not provided for either by the family or the school. He convinced himself that children who had attended kindergartens conducted by competent directors did better on entering school than those who had received no such training, and the weight of

his authoritative statement gave other educators faith in the possibilities of the system. Finally, he proved that with wise training young women of average ability made satisfactory kindergartners. It was impossible to go on repeating that a thing could not be done in face of the fact that it had been done, and with the success of the experiment in St. Louis recognition of the kindergarten as the first stage of all public education became simply a matter of time.

The reasons which convinced Dr. Harris of the value of the kindergarten are stated in the following extract from his monograph entitled Early History of the Kindergarten in St. Louis, Mo.:

"If the school is to prepare especially for the arts and trades it is the kindergarten which is to accomplish the object, for the training of the muscles, if it is to be a training for special skill in manipulation, must be begun in early youth. As age advances it becomes more difficult to acquire new phases of manual dexterity. Two weeks' practice of holding objects in his right hand will make the infant in his first year right handed for life. The muscles yet in a pulpy consistency are very easily set in any fixed direction. The child trained for one year in Froebel's gifts and occupations will acquire a skillful use of his hand and the habit of accurate measurement of the eye, which will be his possession. for life.

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In the common school, drawing, which has obtained only a recent and precarious foothold in our course of study, is the only branch which is intended to cultivate skill in the hand and accuracy in the eye. The kindergarten, on the other hand, develops this by all its groups of gifts.

"Not only is this training of great importance by reason of the fact that most children must depend largely upon manual skill for their future livelihood, but from a broader point of view, we must value skill as the great potence which is emancipating the human race from drudgery by the aid of machinery. Inventions will free man from thraldom to time and space.

By reason of the fact already adverted to, that a short training of certain muscles of the infant will be followed by

the continued growth of the same muscles through his after life, it is clear how it is that the two years of the child's life (his fifth and sixth), or even one year, or a half year in the kindergarten will start into development activities of muscle and brain which will secure deftness and delicacy of industrial power in all after life. The rationale of this is found in the fact that it is a pleasure to use muscles already inured to use; in fact a much-used muscle demands a daily exercise as much as the stomach demands food. But an unused muscle or the mere rudiment of a muscle that has never been used, gives pain on its first exercise. Its contraction

is accompanied with laceration of tissue, and followed by lameness, or by distress on using it again. Hence it happens that the body shrinks from employing an unused muscle, but, on the contrary, demands the frequent exercise of muscles already trained to use. Hence in a thousand ways unconscious to ourselves, we manage to exercise daily whatever muscles we have already trained, and thus keep in practice physical aptitudes for skill in any direction.

"The kindergarten should be a sort of sub-primary education, and receive the pupil at the age of four or four and a half years and hold him until he completes his sixth year. By this means we gain the child for one or two years when he is good for nothing else but education, and not of much value even for the education of the school as it is and has been. The disciplines of reading and writing, geography and arithmetic, as taught in the ordinary primary school, are beyond the powers of the average child not yet entered upon his seventh year. And beyond the seventh year the time of the child is too valuable to use it for other than general disciplines, reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., and drawing. He must not take up his school time with learning a handicraft.

"The kindergarten utilizes a period of the child's life for preparation for the arts and trades without robbing the school of a portion of its needed time.

"Besides the industrial phase of the subject which is pertinent here, we may take note of another one that bears indirectly on the side of productive activity, but has a much wider bearing. At the age At the age of three years the child begins. to emerge from the circumscribed life of the family, and to acquire an interest in the life of society and a proclivity to

form relationship with it. This increases until the school period begins, at his seventh year. The fourth, fifth and sixth years are years of transition not well provided for either by family life or by social life in the United States. In families of great poverty the child forms evil associations in the street, and is initiated into crime. By the time he is ready to enter the school he is hardened in vicious habits, beyond the power of the school to eradicate. In families of wealth, the custom is to entrust the care of the child in this period of his life to some servant without pedagogical skill and generally without strength of will power. The child of wealthy parents usually inherits the superior directive power of the parents, who have by their energy acquired and preserved the wealth. Its manifestation in the child is not reasonable, considerate will power, but arbitrariness and selfwill-with such a degree of stubbornness that it quite overcomes the much feebler native will of the servant who has charge of the children. It is difficult to tell which class (poor or rich,) the kindergarten benefits most. Society is benefited by the substitution of a rational training of the child's will during his transition period. If he is a child of poverty, he is saved by the good associations and the industrial and intellectual training that he gets. If he is a child of wealth, he is saved by the kindergarten from ruin through self-indulgence and the corruption ensuing on weak management in the family. The worst elements in the community are the corrupted and ruined men who were once youth of unusual directive power.- children of parents of strong will."

By reducing his argument in favor of the kindergarten to a brief statement which no one could dispute and whose force every one could appreciate, Dr. Harris greatly increased its weight, and immediately upon the publication of his report the movement in favor of public kindergartens showed an increased momentum. In the twenty-nine years which have elapsed since the successful experiment in St. Louis the kindergarten has been made part of the public school system in one hundred and eighty-nine cities. In 1897-98 the total number of public kindergartens was 1,365; the total number of teachers 2,532; the total number of pupils 95,867.

The cities which have the most fully developed systems of public kindergartens are Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Rochester, Des Moines, Grand Rapids, Brookline, Newark, Jamestown and Los Angeles. Philadelphia, which reports 201 kindergartens, leads in numbers all the cities of the United States. St. Louis follows with 115 kindergartens, New York with 100, Boston with 67, and Chicago with 63. An estimate, based on the sale of kindergarten material, fixes the total number of kindergartens in New York at 600, so that, including private work and association work, this city has presumably a more extensive provision of kindergartens than any other in the United States.

Sixteen cities have a special supervisor of kindergartens. The following states have the most extensive provision of kindergartens, public and private. The order of the names indicates the relative extent of the provision:

I New York

2 Massachusetts

3 Michigan

4 Illinois

5 California

6 Connecticut

7 New Jersey

15 Washington

8 Wisconsin

9 Pennsylvania IO Ohio

II Indiana

12 Iowa

13 Colorado

14 Minnesota

In the year 1873 the National bureau of education began collecting statistics with regard to the total number of kindergartens in the United States. The results are necessarily imperfect, but they enable us to form an approximate idea of the growth of the system. Taking public and private work together, the advance of the kindergarten is shown in the following tables: