After a time the real wants of elementary instruction began to be better appreciated, and the Infant Schools were made to fill an important mission in the progress of primary education in this country. Important changes were introduced from time to time, until that plan of primary schools was developed which now forms so important and admirable a feature in the present system of education in our city schools.

Notwithstanding some of the evil practices of these Infant Schools are still perpetuated in many primary schools, yet the schools for elementary instruction are steadily progressing toward better and more natural methods of training the minds of children, so as to develop more fully all their powers.

THE FIRST SCHOOL-TAX.

The first tax in the city of New York for the support of schools was raised in 1829, by assessing one-eightieth of one per cent. on the valuation of the taxable property of the city. Although the Legislature had previously authorized such a tax, in honor of the tax-payers it may be added,

that this tax was raised in accordance with the request of a memorial to the common council, signed principally by the wealthiest citizens. In 1831 this tax was increased to three-eightieths of one per cent.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS MADE FREE,

The plan which was adopted by the Public School Society of charging tuition for those pupils whose parents were able to pay, at rates varying from twenty-five cents to one dollar per quarter, and of placing on a free-list those whose parents were not able to pay tuition, was found to operate prejudicially to the success of the schools. The free-list was gradually increased, and the amount of tuition-fees reduced from year to year, until 1832, when all charges for tuition were abandoned, and the schools of the Public School Society were made free to all.

During 1832 important changes were made in the management of the primary schools. Simple apparatus was introduced to aid in illustrations of the lessons; and the monitorial system was more generally employed. Owing to the great increase in

the number of primary schools during 1832, '33, and '34, it was found necessary in 1834 to open a school for training those who were employed as monitors in these schools. Pupils were selected from the highest classes of the grammar-schools, and while in the training school, were known as cadets. These were subsequently appointed monitors, and received the small salary of fifty dollars a year. After due experience and success as monitors they were promoted, and then called "passed monitors." From this class, the assistant teach-ers were selected.

Additional grammar and primary schools were established from year to year. In 1838 there were sixteen grammar, and thirty-two primary schools, besides two colored grammar, and some three or four colored primary schools.

THE FIRST COLORED SCHOOL.

In 1787 the first colored school was founded in New York, by the Manumission Society. During the first twenty years its average attendance varied from forty to sixty pupils. In 1809 the monitorial system of instruction was introduced into this school, and the number of pupils increased. In 1834 the Manumission Society transferred colored school No. 1, in Mulberry-street, and the several primary schools which they had organized, to the Public School Society.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN 1840.

The Public School Society had under its care, in 1840, fourteen grammar-schools, each with separate departments for boys and girls, and two schools, with boys and girls in the same department; making six-teen grammar schools, or thirty departments. There were also two colored grammar-schools, each with two departments; and six colored primary schools. In addition to these, there were twelve primary departments in the same buildings with the grammar-schools, and forty-six separate primary schools; making a total of ninety-eight school departments, with an aggregate attendance of about 20,000 children. The total expenditures by the society, for educational purposes, during the

overthrew the Roman Empire, and the continual appeals to the sword by the barbarous rulers after they were settled in their new conquests, wiped out, in time, almost every vestige of literature, law, art, and science which the Romans had spread through Europe. It was under the steel

clad and chivalrous cavaliers of Ferdinand and Isabella, that the monuments of Arab wisdom, mainly consisting of extensive libraries, were destroyed. It was these same

MAY, 1864.

THE WAR AND EDUCATION.

AR, waged against an unholy rebel

lion, is a most beneficent power. The sword, exercised upon the errors of ignorance and treason, is a glorious instrument. And yet war and the sword, however vast and beautiful the regions which they may open up to the benign influences of civilization, are at first and directly destructive to the best interests of education. Generally, experience has afforded bitter proof of this remark. We say generally, for when a Cardinal Ximenes of Spain, pausing in the career of foreign conquest,

returns home to bestow the vast resources of his wealth upon the erection of the splendid University of Alcalá; and when the citizens of a Leyden, upon the very day of their deliverance from one of the most appalling sieges known in history, and while preparing again to pour out their blood and treasures in fighting the hated Philip, turn from such dismal tragedies to lay the foundations of a great school of learning the cases are felt to be so entirely remarkable, and so exceptional, as to excite the astonishment of mankind.

The mailed hand of war, once desperately at the throats of a people, leaves them little leisure to think of, and less superfluous strength to provide for, their intellectual and spiritual wants. The deso

buried in ruins the fairest cities of the newly discovered American continent; and along with them, their curious museums of natural history, their numerous historical and scientific picture-books, and every other mark of their high civilization.

The campaigns of the first Napoleon not only stripped the trades of artisans, and the fields of laborers, but they depopulated educational institutions; and sent many a lad hardly fourteen years of age from the school-room into the ranks, to be converted into a rude and licentious soldier. And how many times the ineffaceable footprints of war can be traced over the plains of Italy, in the broken remains of once glorious architecture, in the vacant galleries of art once adorned with the triumphs of painting and sculpture, and in the loss of manuscripts of most ancient date and priceless value to the scholar; as well as in the impoverishment and degradation of the masses-the historian is absolutely weary with telling.

Whatever instances, on the contrary, may be adduced to show, from its ultimate consequences, that war has been found sometimes to have quickened the sluggish spirit of a people into intellectual activity, as was the result of the Crusades; yet the fact remains unshaken, that it is likely to injure the cause of education for a long time, and certainly does so to an alarming extent to those directly engaged in it.

In regard to our own country, where the struggle is carried on, not by low merce

naries, but by volunteers, among whom are men of the highest culture,-how can it be otherwise? That professors of our colleges should be called from the learned investigations of the study, and the brilliant discoveries of the laboratory; that hundreds of our gifted and partly developed youth should be drawn from the high mental exercises and noble strifes of the class-room into the utter idleness of the camp, and the brutal encounters of the field; that many more can have their eyes diverted from the prize of academic honors to the glittering baubles of fortune, which in these days of strange transitions weave themselves quickly, like Jonah's gourd, over the head of every other adventurer; that the minds of those who do remain at the "seats of the Muses," can be hurried away from their literary tasks to be filled with the exciting accounts of battles, marches, sieges, and the daily inauguration of some new and noisy enterprise; that the inventive skill of thousands hitherto engaged in applying the principles of knowledge to the production of curious machinery and useful arts, can be wasted in bloodshed or turned into other channels,-as is inferred from the greatly diminished business of the patent-office; that the ambition of even little children as well as of older ones should be inflamed by almost every public print, and by almost all conversation, with passionate aspirations to mingle in all the "quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war";—that all these influences, and many more not to be mentioned, but growing out of military operations the most gigantic ever known, and exerting a mighty power, can happen without seriously undermining the present, if not the permanent foundations of education, is too clear to admit of denial, and too sad to be contemplated without fear and trembling. How different all this from that "calm and pleasing solitariness," in which the mind, "fed with cheerful and confident thoughts," attains its ripest development! How different from "beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of

delightful studies," in the enjoyment of which the genius of Milton was inspired to the lofty creations of Paradise Lost, and which seems necessary to the student, if his spirit is to glow in the "gentle mastery" of knowledge, and mount up to scale its grandest heights!

It is with no desire to present a gloomy picture that we have written this, but simply to put the friends of liberal education on guard; that they, by being forewarned, may be forearmed against all the dangers that threaten. Of course it is to be hoped that our people, having already so largely, we might say, so universally, enjoyed the privileges of the school-house, will never forget nor forego them. But it will not do to rest idly in this hope. Every teacher, every professor, ought to be more intensely alive, more ardent in his calling than ever before. We are glad to see that some of them are so, as is evident from the movements recently inaugurated liberally and permanently to endow certain colleges and other literary institutions. All hail! every such effort to take a wise advantage of the present abundance of greenbacks! every friend of the cause exert his influence to the utmost to fill these institutions with scholars; and at the same time, let him demand that the standard of scholarship be kept up-and if possible, elevated.

IT.

NATIONAL EDUCATION.

Let

T has been heretofore shown in the colums of the Monthly, that education should be nationalized in the United States. It has been affirmed to be one of those paramount objects of general concern which not only justify but demand the exercise of the national authority in their behalf. It has been proven to be indispensable to national unity and national strength. For unless intelligence is made universal, suffrage cannot safely be made universal. And where suffrage is not universal, freedom cannot be universal.

And, again, experience has demonstrated

that when education is left to the optional action of individual States, it will be but partially provided for in some of them, and entirely neglected or perverted in others. Hence our General Government, representing and conserving the interests of all the States, and of the whole people, should ex-. ercise its power and influence to secure the means of education to "every child whom its soil maintains." And it should aim to provide such an education as befits the character and harmonizes with the spirit and destiny of the nation. Our present State systems are too often vague and indefinite in the ends proposed, while in their practical working they are inefficient and unsatisfactory. The character and extent of the course of studies in our common schools, for example, are scarcely yet determined with any precision in a single State. The standard of qualification for teachers is practically no better regulated. The attendance of the children upon the schools provided for their instruction, is left to the caprice or to the supposed convenience of parents and guardians, many times too ignorant or too penurious (or both) to appreciate the necessity of a careful and assiduous cultivation of the youthful faculties. That close and faithful supervision which is indispensable to the efficient progress of any enterprise, and especially of a system of schools, is as yet scarcely known in most of the States, even where education is recognized as both a public and private necessity. In many of the States no adequate pecuniary provision, either through a permanent fund or by taxation, has been made for the support of educational institutions. There is yet a lamentable want of organization in these State systems, and hence a waste of individual and collective effort. There is but little of that cohesion and unity in the various parts of these systems which are indispensable to the highest results in practice.

And another defect is found in the fact, that our schools, generally, seem to ignore those studies which tend to train the youth of our country for the high duties of citizen

ship. These studies comprise a knowledge of the peculiar structure of our government, of the relations of the various parts to the whole, and of the rights and duties of the citizen under the same. They comprehend the infusion into the minds and hearts of the young of a national spirit of patriotism and of devotion to country. They do not succeed, to the extent which is desirable and necessary, in bringing up the citizen in the spirit of the government, or in casting him, as it were, in the mould of the Constitution.

Now the question is, how the nation can interfere in behalf of this great work. That it should interfere is unquestionable, since its first duty is that of self-preservation and self-elevation. The nation lives for the sublime purpose of educating itself. But how can it educate itself except through a diligent and persistent use of the powers and forces at its command, in the right direction? It will be our purpose to suggest hereafter some of the practical measures which seem adapted to the end in view.

SALEM TOWN.

We regret to announce the decease, at his residence in Aurora, Cayuga Co., N. Y., of the Hon. Salem Town, in the eightythird year of his age. Mr. Town has been for considerably more than half a century prominently identified with the cause of popular education in the State of New York, and few men, either living or dead, have contributed so largely to its progress.

Through all the years of his long and useful life, he was a close, methodical, and industrious student, and hence he was ever able to draw from the ample storehouse of his mind treasures new and old. At the teacher's institute, in the educational convention, and in the social circle, he was equally gifted and happy in all his sayings. and doings. He was everywhere the same kind, genial, generous man, whom none knew but to love, whom none named but to praise.

There is one chapter in his life which we have heard Mr. Town relate, and which is full of interest and instruction, while it at the same time illustrates the energy and perseverance with which he set out on his professional career. While in college, he remarked that he imbibed the notion, which is far too common among students, that at his graduation his education would be complete, and that he would know all that is worth knowing. But at the close of his college course, an examination of his mental resources satisfied him that as yet he knew but little, that he was then only ready to begin to know. He found that precisely what he most needed,- -a knowledge of men and things,-he was profoundly ignorant of. He accordingly resolved to spend six months in a course of general reading and reflection. To this end, he secured a quiet room in a retired place, and employed a person to supply him with fuel and to build his fires, in order that every moment of his time might be sedulously devoted to his work. He first commenced a course of history: we believe he began with Plutarch's Lives, and thus spent hour by hour, and month by month in perusing, analyzing, and digesting the lives and actions of men in the ages of the past. His plan was to read with great attention a few pages, stopping at some convenient point to reflect, to weigh, and compare. During this latter process, he would rise from the table, pace back and forth, in his room, throwing his hands backwards and forwards, and thus secure the needed physical exercise, without loss of time from his studies. After he had thoroughly digested a character or a subject, he would frequently spend a portion of his time in writing

commentaries. and strengthening his mental impressions, gave him the "pen of a ready writer," and in a measure fitted him for the preparation of the useful works which have added so much to the educational facilities of the present time.

This, besides deepening

There are other incidents

in the life of Salem Town which we should like to relate did space permit. We earnestly hope that some one, who was intimately acquainted with him, and who can gain access to his papers, will prepare, for the benefit of the profession which he so long adorned, a faithful biography of one who, but for his extreme modesty, would have been more widely known while living. If a faithful history of his private and professional life could be prepared and published, it could not fail to be a most

instructive and valuable addition to the educational literature of the country. It is impossible that a man like Salem Town should not have left behind him the most ample materials for such a work. If these few and hasty words, prompted by a deep feeling of affectionate gratitude for the good man, should chance to fall under the observation of his immediate friends and rela tives, we hope they will consider our suggestion. We can truly say of Salem Town, in his honored grave:

"Peace to the just man's memory,-let it grow Greener with years, and blossom through the

ELECTION OF REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY.-The Legislature has filled the vacancies in the Board of Regents of the University by the election of Geo. W. Curtis to fill

the place opened by the resignation of John Lorimer Graham, and of Alexander S. Johnson to that of the late Dr. Campbell.

These are admirable selections. Judge