EDUCATIONAL POWER OF MODERN ACTIVITY.

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ferring on the laborer. Formerly, the laborer was an unintelligent machine; all important responsibility was laid on the intelligent superintendent, and comprehensive intelligence in the laborer was not required. As labor is generalized and brought into harmony with great natural forces and laws, the laborer is required to be also a thinker; and the wider the mental range, the more accurate the knowledge, the better the duty is performed. He must not only know how and when to act personally, but how others should act that he may adjust his action to theirs. This demand for intelligence, this dividing of responsibility for results among all the employes, is a constantly enlarging process, and in the same degree develops independent knowledge, mental discipline and reliability. These imply a practical education.

At the same time the barriers to observation are being thrown down. The railroad and the steamer are making men acquainted with each other, filling their thoughts with comparisons, begetting ideals prompting to improvement; the electric telegraph and the newspaper are employed in making observations in every part of the world and in taking all men into their confidence. Every event of importance is immediately known over the whole civilized world, men take a silent view of the world's work of the day before every morning if they choose--and most true Americans in active life choose.

Comprehensive activity is more and more the rule; operations as well as observation take an ever wider range; local interests are more and more affected by distant events, and associated with many interests on the other side of the world, or in distant places. The activity of the American is naturally intense; he is absorbed in his aims and attentive to all that affects them. Therefore, the laborer, the artisan, the farmer, watch and study the direction of events that may affect their personal welfare. They read, discuss, become original politicians, financiers and theorists. Life grows intense while its

sphere widens; earnestness of attention to wide relations and distant occurrences has the force of an education, or, at least, it stimulates ever larger numbers to the acquisition of knowledge and the formation of a personal judgment that imply an education or drawing out of the powers of the mind. The activities of the last generation have done much more, probably, to really educate the mass of Americans than all the instruction of the schools. They have formed a practical, impressive and very intelligible course of education. This practical appreciation of the value of knowledge among the adult population inclined them to reading, and the lively interest awakened in public events did not decline after the war. The general news was freely circulated by conversation and discussion even among those who seldom read. The newspapers published in the Valley, in 1860, numbered 2,000, and 3,000 in 1870, the rest of the country having 2,800. The annual issues of all the papers of the Valley, in 1870, was about 6,000,000 to 14,000,000 in the whole country. The whole number of copies issued in the year in the Valley was 525,000,000 to 1,500,000,000 in the whole of the United States. The East contains the commercial, the literary and the political metropolis. The writers and publishers of the East find a large part of their readers in the West-the publishing in the Valley being mainly for the supply of local wants. The enterprise of the Valley does not allow its information to get out of date.

The census marshals of 1870 found 164,000 libraries of books in the United States, 100,000 of which they credited to the Valley; but, if more numerous, they were naturally smaller by a large average. Of 45,000,000 volumes in all the libraries of the country but 20,000,000 were found in the Valley. Many of them were of recent date and more valuable to the masses of the people from having a smaller number of old books rarely consulted. Of 56,000 libraries, other than private, in the country, 24,000 were in the Valley, containing

LIBRARIES AND CHURCHES IN THE VALLEY.

473

but 6,000,000, out of the 19,000,000 volumes in them all. In 1875 the Bureau of Education reported 250 public libraries of 300 volumes and over, established in various parts of the Valley since 1870, which contained, in the aggregate, nearly 500,000 volumes.

The number of church edifices in the Valley in 1870, was 34,030, with 10,346,472 sittings, at a cost of $121,300,000-the whole country having 72,000 churches, 21,600,000 sittings, and its church property being valued at $354,000,000. The newer regions of the West supply religious instruction to large numbers-possibly to some millions-without edifices specially devoted to that object. The average cost of churches in the East is nearly nine thousand dollars and in the Valley about three thousand five hundred. The Valley, as a whole, may be considered, relatively, fairly well supplied with the means of moral education.

All these instruments of intelligence are perhaps exceeded, for the purposes of the present generation, by social intercourse, by constant discussion, by the educating power of experience and observation. The study of American institutions and ideas during a period of crisis so great and interesting gave a special clearness of insight to the citizens who reconstructed it on a broader base and gave it a more perfect development and unity. In spite of all the faults they committed, future generations will look back at them with admiration and reverence, for, to them, the faults will appear comparatively small and the service they rendered really large.

CHAPTER XV.

THE WONDERFUL PROGRESS OF POPULAR EDUCATION.

When the armies were disbanded at the close of the war the expenditures and energy that had been required to support it were immediately turned to the great enterprises of peace." Manufactures, internal commerce and education gained in magnitude and force in a few years quite as much as in the entire past career of the Republic. Between 1860 and 1870 the capital employed in manufactures increased from one thousand and nine million dollars to two thousand, one hundred and eighteen million. From 28,000 miles, in 1860, the lines of railway open to traffic had increased to 62,000, in 1872, and, in 1870, the values transported in the internal commerce of the country were double those of 1865. The property valuation of the country ascended from sixteen thousand million dollars, in 1860, to thirty thousand million in 1870, notwithstanding the vast destruction and expense of the war and throwing out of property valuation nearly four million of the colored population of the country. The comparison of funds devoted to educational purposes is still more striking. In 1860 the expenditure for schools of all kinds in the United States was thirty-four million dollars; in 1870 it amounted to ninety-five million.

When it is considered how vast were the sums withdrawn from the available capital of the country by the war, and how many embarrassments, that might have been expected to cripple its progress, sprang from that wasteful contest, it will not seem exaggeration to say that a new era of unaccustomed strength and rapidity of development dated from its close. The effective force of American ideas, enterprise and energy seemed to have been at least quadrupled. There was a rush of

a

GROWTH OF SCHOOL REVENUES IN TEN YEARS. 475

prosperity for the first eight years, which placed the country in a new position. The rills and modest streams had suddenly expanded into mighty rivers. If they then ceased to overflow their sources were not dried up; they still sent forth steady and powerful currents. The talent and intelligence of the country had been at school for ninety years and now first began to reap the full fruit of their studies and experiences and to display the character and vigor of their manhood. The apprentice had become the master.

Americans have been reproached, without good reason, for extreme devotion to their material interests. The mistake arose from the circumstance that earnestness and progress in this field were more apparent than in the higher one of culture, to make a striking showing in which required a maturity of organization and an abundance of accumulated wealth impossible in formative periods. These had been gathered to such an extent by the commencement of the war that, at its close, when the results began to do justice to the real efforts of the past, they assumed an imposing magnitude. This is made summarily apparent by comparison of the school revenues of some of the leading States in different sections in 1860 and 1870. Massachusetts devoted $2,200,000, to all her schools, in 1860, and $4,800,000 in 1870; New York gave $5,000,000 to schools in 1860 and $15,900,000 in 1870; Ohio and Pennsylvania each a little over $3,000,000 in 1860, and about $10,000,000 in 1870; Illinois had advanced from $2,500,000, in 1860, to $9,900,000 in 1870; Missouri from $1,200,000 to $4,300,000; Iowa from $700,000 to $3,500,000; California from $277,000 to $2,946,000; even Kentucky, wasted by war on her soil and her labor system profoundly disturbed, advanced from $1,080,000 in 1860 to $2,530,000 in 1870, and Tennessee gave $600,000 more for education in 1870 than 1860, though it then exceeded $1,000,000.

This increase of school revenues was attended by an improvement in educational systems which doubled the value