poohed at schools because it is "the examples in our daily contemplation at home, and in domestic life, not the discipline of schools, that shape the morals of a people"; and he adds the familiar argument that "the attainment of an education superior to our station or the business for which we are destined is very apt to unfit a man for both."1

For secondary education a few northern cities had public high schools, and boys were often fitted for college by the village parson; but the defects in public instruction were in part supplied by excellent endowed academies, charging moderate fees and serving as an intellectual centre for miles around. Many of them received boarding pupils-in some cases, both in the east and west, boys and girls being educated together. The south was very deficient in education of this grade, especially for girls; for though academies were early founded, the constituency of people able to send their children away to school was small, and the schools lacked support.

The college education of the time, though in many ways narrow, was encouraging. The half-dozen preRevolutionary colleges in half a century grew to about sixty, of which almost half were in the south. The first provision for a public state university was made by North Carolina in 1791, although it was many years before it became effective; most of the new colleges, north and south, were planted as series of learning and piety by the various re

king. Letters from the South (ed. of 1835), I., 221–223.

ligious denominations. A great impetus was given to southern colleges by the University of Virginia, suggested, fostered, and wisely organized by Thomas Jefferson, who lived to see its buildings opened, almost under the shadow of his seat at Monticello. In its spirit and in its work the University of Virginia was in advance of any other American college of the time; it placed an intellectual stamp on the whole south, set an example to the country, and became the mother of a lively brood of young colleges.

In the period from 1815 to 1840 a score or more of young American scholars found their way to Göttingen or Tübingen or Heidelberg, and imbibed the German tradition of investigation in search of ultimate truth. Colleges spread rapidly into the west, where, in 1826, Western Reserve University was founded at Hudson, Ohio, as a western Yale; and in the course of the two decades 1830 to 1850 Michigan and some other of the western states laid the foundations of a new type of state university.

The number of southern colleges in this period is striking. In 1830 there were twenty-four; in 1860 they had increased to about seventy, scattered all through the south, including the Tennessee and Kentucky mountains. With the exception, however, of the universities of Virginia and North Carolina and the College of South Carolina at Columbia, none of them had a national reputation, and few more than a hundred students;1 and they lacked

1 De Bow's Review, X., 477.

good business management, so that their land grants vanished and their invested funds dwindled. The main reason for the want of prosperity was the small number of students who could be drawn from the community and the competition between too many small colleges. There was complaint also of the dissipation in some colleges. The wealthy planters had a habit of sending their sons abroad,' or more commonly north, to be educated. Jefferson himself complained that "Harvard will still prime it over us with her twenty professors," and objected to sending students to northern institutions where they would unlearn the lessons of their own community. During the decade 1830-1840 about ten per cent. of the students of Harvard and Columbia came from the south; in 1841 twenty per cent. of the Yale students and half of the students of Princeton. Among the southerners thus educated were John C. Calhoun, of Yale, and Barnwell Rhett, of Harvard, both of them examples of the small effect of northern colleges in changing the point of view of south

erners.

The sixty-odd colleges, so-called, in the Union in 1830 probably did not include more than four thousand students of real collegiate rank, out of a population of thirteen millions; six times that population

1 Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, 129.

2 Reprehended in De Bow's Review, XXVII., 265; Marshall, Home Education at the South.

'Jefferson, Works (Washington ed.), VII., 202.

now has nearly forty times the number of college students. Except in Latin, Greek, and a few mathematical subjects, the colleges of that time were no further advanced than the best high schools and academies to-day; the students entered at fifteen or sixteen years of age, and lived a life of their own, scandalizing neighbors by horse - play which was not then reported in the metropolitan newspapers. It was an era of remarkable college presidents -Eliphalet Nott, of Union; Mark Hopkins, of Williams; Francis Wayland, of Brown; Thomas Cooper, of South Carolina-vigorous men whose personality left an undying impression upon their students; but the teaching was perfunctory, the range of studies small, and few of the college professors highly trained.

Of professional and technical schools there is little to say at this time. West Point, founded in 1802, was a good school of its kind, but still narrow and unprogressive. Medical schools sprang up in the principal cities where there was clinical material, two of the most prominent as parts of the universities of Pennsylvania and Harvard, but most of them were private institutions carried on for profit by the preceptors. Separate schools for the training of the clergy arose, notably the Congregational Andover Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian Theological School at Princeton.

The truth, painful to an academic person, that a low state of popular education and a high condition

of literature may walk hand-in-hand was made clear in the decade from 1830 to 1840; for it is the beginning of the golden age of American literature. Up to that time the aim of most American writers was not to please, but to convince. The favorite kind of literature was the public speech, for Americans loved oratory. Patrick Henry spoke his appeals; Tom Paine, James Otis, Sam Adams, and John Dickinson put them within the covers of their pamphlets. After the Revolution, men like John Randolph and Josiah Quincy, as a matter of course, approached their countrymen through their speeches in Congress and out-of-doors. The year 1830 marks the climax of American oratory in the Webster-Hayne debate, in which the great New-Englander's splendid sentences and lofty principles placed him alongside Lord Chatham as one of the foremost users of the English tongue.

Nobody knows how life is breathed into the nostrils of the writer who can express the spirit of his countrymen and join in creating a national literature. Perhaps the great literary awakening was due to the different parts of the country coming together so as to give the poet, the essayist, and the journalist a national constituency, just when Americans were beginning to feel the exuberant sense of being a power in the world. Pulpit eloquence took on a new form when William Ellery Channing, Father Taylor the sailors' preacher, and later Henry Ward Beecher, and their compeers aroused, charmed,