all their authority, nor royal academy with all its sages and literary men, can do: she is changing the meaning of charity into duty.

For the support of the poor, nine-tenths of whose cost originate with foreigners or come from one prolific vice, whose last convulsive energies she is now struggling to subdue, she annually pays more than three hundred thousand dollars; for the support and improvement of public highways, she pays a much larger sum; and, within the last dozen or fourteen years, she has invested a capital in railroads, within and without the State, of nearly or quite sixty millions of dollars.

Whence comes her means to give with each returning year more than a million of dollars to public education, more than another million to religion, and more than a third to ameliorate and succor the afflicted and the ignorant at home, and to bless, in distant lands, those who sit in the region and shadow of death? How does she support her poor, maintain her public ways, and contribute such vast sums for purposes of internal improvement, besides maintaining her immense commercial transactions with every zone in the world?

Has she a vast domain? Her whole territory would not make a court-yard of respectable dimensions to stand in front of many of the states and territories belonging to the Union. Does she draw revenues from conquered provinces or subjugated realms? She conquers nothing, she subdues nothing, save the great elemental forces of Nature, which God gives freely, whenever and wherever they are asked for in the language of genius and science, and in regard to which no profusion or prodigality to one can diminish the bounty always ready for others.

Does she live by the toil of a race of serfs and vassals whom she holds in personal and hereditary bondage?-by one comprehensive and sovereign act of violence seizing upon both body and soul at once, and superseding the thousand acts of plunder which make up the life of a common robber? Every man who treads her sacred soil is free; all are free alike; and within her borders, for any purpose connected with human slavery, iron will not be welded into a fetter.

Has she rich mines of the precious metals? In all her coffers there is not a drachm of silver or of gold which has not been obtained by the sweat of her brow or the vigor of her

brain.

Has she magazines of mineral wealth imbedded in the earth? or are her soil and climate so spontaneously exuberant that she reaps luxuriant harvests from uncultivated fields? Alas! the orator has barbed his satire by declaring her only natural productions to be granite and ice.

Whence, then, I again ask, comes her wealth? I do not mean the gorgeous wealth which is displayed in the voluptuous and too often enervating residences of the affluent, but that golden mean of property such as Agur asked for in his perfect prayerwhich carries blessings in its train to thousands of householders, which spreads solid comfort and competence through the dwellings of the land, which furnishes the means of instruction, of social pleasures and refinement to the citizens at large, which saves from the cruel sufferings and the more cruel temptations of penury. The families scattered over her hills and along her valleys have not merely a shelter from the inclemencies of the seasons, but the sanctuary of a home. Not only food, but books, are spread upon their tables. Her commonest houses have the means of hospitality. They have appliances for sickness, and resources laid up against accident and the infirmities of age. Whether in her rural districts or her populous towns, a wandering, native-born beggar is a prodigy; and the twelve millions of dollars deposited in her savings institutions do not more loudly proclaim the frugality and providence of the past than they foretell the competence and enjoyments of the future.

One copious, exhaustless fountain supplies all this abundance. It is education,― the. intellectual, moral, and religious education of the people. Having no other mines to work, Massachusetts has mined into the human intellect; and, from its limitless resources, she has won more sustaining and enduring prosperity and happiness than if she had been founded on a stratification of silver and gold, reaching deeper down than geology has yet penetrated. From her high religious convictions she has learned that great lesson,—to set a value upon time. Regarding the faculties as the gift of God, she has felt bound both to use and to improve them. Mingling skill and intelligence with the daily occupations of life, she has made labor honorable; and, as a necessary consequence, idleness is disgraceful. Knowledge has been the ambition of her sons, and she has reverenced and venerated the purity and chastity of her matrons and her daughters. At the hearthstone, at the

family table, and at the family altar,-on all those occasions where the structure of the youthful character is builded up,these sentiments of love for knowledge, and of reverence for maidenly virtue, have been builded in; and there they stand, so wrought and mingled with the fibres of being that none but God can tell which is Nature and which is education, which we owe primarily to the grace of Heaven and which to the co-operating wisdom of the institutions of men. ... He who studies the present or the historic character of Massachusetts will see (and he who studies it most profoundly will see most clearly) that whatever of abundance, of intelligence, or of integrity, whatever of character at home or of renown abroad, she may possess, all has been evolved from the enlightened and, at least, partially Christianized mind, not of a few, but of the great masses, of her people. They are not the result of outward riches or art brought around it or laminated over it, but of an awakened inward force, working energetically outwards, and fashioning the most intractable circumstances to the dominion of its own desires and resolves; and this force has been awakened and its unspent energies replenished, more than from all things else, by her common schools.

When we witness the mighty achievements of art,- the locomotive, taking up its burden of a hundred tons, and transporting it for hundreds of miles between the rising and the setting sun; the steamboat, cleaving its rapid way, triumphant over wind and tide; the power-loom, yielding products of greater richness and abundance in a single day than all the inhabitants of Tyre could have manufactured in years; the printing-press, which could have replaced the Alexandrian Library within a week after it was burnt; the lightning, not only domesticated in the laboratories of the useful arts, but employed as a messenger between distant cities; and galleries of beautiful paintings, quickened into life by the sunbeams,— when we see all these marvels of power and of celerity, we are prone to conclude that it is to them we are indebted for the increase of our wealth and for the progress of our society. But were there any statistics to show the aggregate value of all the thrifty and gainful habits of the people at large, the greater productiveness of the educated than of the brutified laborer, the increased power of the intelligent hand, and the broad survey and deep intuition of the intelligent eye; could we see a ledger account of the profits which come from forethought, order, and system as they preside

over all our farms, in all our workshops, and emphatically in all the labors of our households, we should then know how rapidly their gathered units swell into millions upon millions. The skill that strikes the nail's head instead of the fingers' ends, the care that mends a fence and saves a cornfield, that drives a horseshoe nail and secures both rider and horse, that extinguishes a light and saves a house, the prudence that cuts the coat according to the cloth, that lays by something for a rainy day and that postpones marriage until reasonably sure of a livelihood, the forethought that sees the end from the beginning, and reaches it by the direct route of an hour instead of the circuitous gropings of a day, the exact remembrance impressed upon childhood to do the errand as it was bidden, and, more than all, the economy of virtue over vice, of restrained over pampered desires,— these things are not set down in the works on political economy; but they have far more to do with the wealth of nations than any laws which aim to regulate the balance of trade, or any speculations on capital and labor, or any of the great achievements of art. That vast variety of ways in which an intelligent people surpass a stupid one, and an exemplary people an immoral one, has infinitely more to do with the well-being of a nation than soil or climate, or even than government itself, excepting so far as government may prove to be the patron of intelligence and virtue.

From her earliest colonial history the policy of Massachusetts has been to develop the minds of all her people, and to imbue them with the principles of duty. To do this work most effectually, she has begun it with the young. If she would continue to mount higher and higher toward the summit of prosperity, she must continue the means by which her present elevation has been gained. In doing this, she will not only exercise the noblest prerogative of government, but will cooperate with the Almighty in one of his sublimest works.

Horace Mann's greatest services to education must be sought in the field of institutions, organization, administration, legislation, and public opinion. He was a great constructive pedagogist, a wise educational statesman, an eloquent tribune of the common school. He called upon the people of all classes, as with the voice of a herald, to raise their estimate of public instruction, and to provide better facilities by which it could be furnished. He devised or

adopted new educational agencies, and persuaded the people to use them. He organized public opinion, and influenced the action of legislatures. He gave men higher ideas of the work and character of the teacher at the same time that he taught the teacher to magnify his office. He heightened the popular estimate of the instruments that are conducive and necessary to the existence of good schools. He elevated men's ideas of the value of ethical training, and made valuable suggestions looking to its prosecution. But his great theme was the relation of intellectual and moral knowledge to human well-being, individual and social. Here his faith never faltered, his ardor never cooled. In no other name did he trust for the safety of society. A confirmed rationalist, he looked with supreme confidence to the healing power of popular intelligence and virtue. In his successive reports and addresses he set forth his faith, and the grounds of it, with wonderful force of statement and fertility of illustration. To him the old theme was ever new and ever fascinating. He poured into the body politic a large measure of his own lofty faith, his great unselfishness, his burning enthusiasm. He believed in the democratizing movement of modern times, and preached the perfectibility of man. It was in this way that, as Mr. Parker said, he took up the common schools of Massachusetts in his arms and blessed them. No doubt he committed the mistake that rationalists are always prone to commit,- that of overestimating the power of intelligence as a means to virtue. Still, it is perfectly obvious that a generous measure of such confidence is a prerequisite to the efficiency and even to the existence of public schools, and that it forms the very foundation of democratic government.- Hinsdale.

Horace Mann was the great leader in the Common School Revival in New England in the middle of the present century. The Massachusetts State Board of Education was created in 1837, through the efforts of James G. Carter and others; and Mann became its first secretary, holding the position until 1848. His influence upon educational thought and sentiment, not only in Massachusetts, but throughout the country, was unparalleled. To him more, perhaps, than to any other, our common-school system is indebted for its remarkable development during the last half of the century. His twelve annual reports, each devoted to distinct subjects, are classics in our educational literature. The tenth report, that of 1846, is given in the present leaflet, almost in its entirety. A brief outline of the twelve reports may be found in Hinsdale's little volume upon Mann, chap. vii; also in Dr. William T. Harris's address at the Mann Centennial, printed in the Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1895-96, vol. i. All of these reports are printed in full in the Life and Works of Horace Mann, 5 vols.; and here also (vol. ii.) may be found the seven lectures delivered by Mann in successive years before the various county conventions of the State. The third and fifth of these lectures, "The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government" and "An