ibraries with everything needed (except books and periodicals) of the best patterns deised by or known to the officers and committees of the association, of which it is the angible representative for manufacturing and distributing improved appliances and suplies. It secures trained cataloguers and assistants or finds positions for those out of employment, gives technical advice in its consultation department, and in all practicable ways fosters library interests. Ten years after the Journal, which, because of its limited circulation, barely pays expenses at five dollars a year, came its co-laborer, Library Notes, a quarterly magazine of librarianship, specially devoted to the modern methods and spirit, and circulated widely because of its low price. Last of the great steps came the school for training librarians and cataloguers, which two years ago was opened at Columbia College through the same influence which had before started the association, Journal, Bureau, and Notes. You who appreciate what normal schools are doing to improve our teaching will remember that librarians need a training school more than teachers, who have had the experience of their own school life as a pattern, for librarians till two years ago never had opportunity for training and came to their work like teachers who had been self-taught, and not only had no normal school advantages, but had never been in a school or class room even as pupils. As evidence of the growth of the idea, we may note that this library school, which began two years ago with a twelve-weeks' course and provision for five to ten pupils, has in two years developed to a course of two full years with four times as many students at work, and in spite of the rapidly increased requirements for admission is to-day embarrassed by five times as many candidates as it can receive. This means a recognition of the high calling of the modern librarian, who works in the modern spirit with the high ideals which the school holds before its pupils. Of this work I said recently to the collegiate alumnæ:

'Compare this work with that of the clergyman or teacher, whose fields of usefulness are universally put in the first rank. The clergyman has before him for one or two hours per week perhaps one-tenth or one-twentieth of the people in his parish. Not so many, indeed, when we remember how there are often little struggling churches of a half-dozen denominations, where one strong church could do all the work much better. Beyond this very limited number for this very limited time, the clergy man is dependent on the slow process of personal, parochial calls. I yield to none in my appreciation of the great work which he does, and do not forget the constant stream of good influences coming from bis daily life, and the many direct efforts he puts forth; but I am speaking now of his work as a preacher, and of the limits which circumstances seem to set to it.

"The teacher has a larger proportion of her constituency in the earlier years, but only for a few hours a day and only in the months when schools are in session. It constantly happens that just as she becomes deeply interested in a bright, promising boy or girl, and feels that here is an opportunity to develop a strong character by patient work, the child comes and says, 'I am not coming to school any more; I am going to work in the factory,' or, I am going to help mother at home.' For the great majority the work of education is hardly begun before the necessities of life take them away from the teacher's influence. "But the earnest librarian may have for a congregation almost the entire community, regardless of denomination or political party. His services are continuous and in the wide-reaching influences of the library there is no vacation. When a bright boy or girl has been once found and interested and started, he is almost sure to continue under these influences all his life. It has been found entirely practicable for a skilful librarian thus to reach and interest people who have never been in the habit of reading; to lead readers into new and more profitable fields, and to create a thirst for better books. In fact the number of ways in which people can be helped is only equalled by the power and lasting character of this influence which comes from good books. Recognizing these facts there are preachers who are looking to the adoption of the library profession as a way to spread the Master's word even more effectively than in the pulpit; and there are teachers whose whole hearts have been given to the cause of popular education, who are eager to enter this newer field, because they recognize in it a still wider opportunity." Is it not true that the ideal librarian fills a pulpit where there is service every day during all the waking hours, with a large proportion of the community frequently in the congregation? Has he not a school in which the classes graduate only at death? Much is already done, and while the work is in its infancy, it is an infant so vigorous as to leave no fears of its manhood. A last great step remains to be taken, and to-day and here it ought to be begun. The State long ago recognized its school system as one of its bulwarks, and fosters it with yearly increasing expenditure. Now it must recognize educational libraries as necessary companions of the most successful schools. This eminent body represents the higher education of the Empire State, which the regents of the university are charged with fostering. Tell me if you think they can, without taking action, face our facts that the best reading more than the schools give education to our people; that the colleges provide for only the trifling minority who can afford time and money to share in their great advantages; that the influence conceded to be the

most potent is left without guidance, supervision, stimulus, or support. When inse tion shows that a school has attained a certain standard, it is honored by being a "regents' academy." Can we do less than give similar inspections to libraries, an when one is found doing the high work at which we have glanced to-day, honor it making it a "regents' library," and by virtue of success in its high calling, a men of this convocation which represents the institutions that give New York its high education? What greater stimulus can we place before our growing libraries than st certain and official recognition of superior work?

Many advantages are sure to spring from entering wisely on this course. I do advocate undue haste. The essential thing is to recognize the principle and then ei year by year the growing demand for advice and inspiration. There need be no obl atory supervision. A library secretary would soon have more requests for advice i help than he could well answer. New communities are constantly waking to the tee: of libraries, and would be deeply grateful for wise advice as to the best means of de veloping interest, raising money, selecting, cataloguing, and circulating books, and 12 thousand details which make or mar success. It is well known to the experienced the the same money can be made to do double good under wise administration, and yet lack of just such help as could be afforded at a cost to the State too trifling to be ward mentioning, many a community either fails to secure its library, or fails to get from i all the good that the time and money could be made to yield.

There are few topics where technical knowledge and experience are so important a in establishing and administering successfully a library of the highest grade in its ideas even though its income be small and its books comparatively few. It requires no vivi imagination to picture the practical value to the State if any town, about to found new library or improve an old one, could come to the regents and have, without charg the best guidance for its case that the combined experience of the library world had ye worked out. Time allows me only to lodge the thought in your minds. No expensive machinery is required. A single salary, with a hearty recognition of the work, would start it creditably.

Such an officer would soon find money and books placed in his hands by those wishing to give them where they would do most good, and recognizing his superior facilite for wisest distribution. The excellent results that have become notable from the re gents' school examinations would be duplicated in good effects on library interests by competent inspections, reports, and suggestions to such libraries as wished them. Ne York's splendid collection, the best owned by any State library, is about being moved into these adjoining rooms, which are admirably adapted for the focus of State library interests and the central people's university. The regent's office is ideally fitted to be the centre of a system of university extension, such as is marking an era in the great English universities, and carrying to all parts of the kingdom the learning of Oxfor and Cambridge and the other great schools, and for the first time giving them a practical connection with the lives of the masses, and making them a new and mighty force in working out higher standards of good citizenship. This work naturally centres st local libraries. Fellows and teachers from the colleges go out for a trifling fee, to dis tant towns, to give courses of ten to twenty lectures on political economy, history, literature, science, or art; indeed, the whole range of the university curriculum is open With the lectures are given references to the best books to be found in the local lib ries, and the common people hear them gladly. Interest is aroused. Many are led to read and learn more than has been told them in the lecture. Those most interested meet for discussion and further instruction, and the practical results have been so much beyond expectation that the universities are allowing work of this kind to be credited as a part of a university course leading to a degree. This means that many a man who would otherwise spend his time idling about saloons, secures instead a higher educ tion worthy the name. Cambridge alone, I am told, has carried on over six hundred of these admirable university extension courses in the past ten years.

Do I hear some one say that New York has tried the scheme of libraries for the State and that it has failed? With that story I am familiar. We have learned by experience what not to do. Every great movement is apt to succeed only through repetitions and failures. The district school system failed because too widely dissipated and because it had no supervision such as I have merely hinted at to-day. Who could expect twelve thousand libraries to be administered successfully in a State where there were not twelve men that could be fairly said to be thoroughly fitted for the work?

The great State of New York led all the rest in recognizing, many years ago, the impor tance of good reading and in trying to meet the want. Seventeen other States followed its example, and we are proud of our leadership. To-day State after State has left New York behind. More than once in our national library conventions have we of New York been forced to hear her slightingly spoken of because she was doing so little mode library work. But no State has yet given recognition to all that this new work implies

If New York will again rise to the occasion and officially recognize the library as a part of its system of higher education and give to libraries of the highest type as fast as they reach the standards a seat in this convocation as being in fact as well as in resolution co-workers with the colleges and the universities, then again shall she wear her crown of leadership. If she fails, before many more meetings some other State will have seized the opportunity that now is hers.

Gentlemen of the convocation, it is to-day your high privilege to lead. To-morrow it may be your bounden duty to follow.

2

HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE NORTH-WEST TERRITORY.

BY GEORGE W. KNIGHT, PH. D.,

Professor of History and Political Science in Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

[Read before the American Historical Association, at Washington, December 27, 1888.]

Many of the members of this association have learned with pleasure that the National Bureau of Education, under the direction of the present Commissioner, Col. N. H. R. Dawson, has authorized the preparation and undertaken the publication of a series of monographs upon the history of higher educational work in the United States. This important undertaking, when completed, should be of great value to all who are engaged upon or interested in the growth and progress of American colleges and universities in general, their objects, scope, and success, their relations to and influence upon popular education on the one hand and upon the advance of higher educational ideas and attainments on the other; and finally, the results of these studies should throw much light upon the question, already broad and constantly broadening, of the relations and duties (if such there be) of the Nation and the State, under our democratic form of government, in the control or maintenance, at public expense, of higher educational institutions. Hearty thanks are due to Commissioner Dawson for this work, and also to Dr. H. B. Adams, who has prepared the first two monographs in the series and who is exercising editorial supervision over the others.

The work in various States has been delegated to different men, and it having fallen to the writer of this paper to prepare the material for some of the States of the old NorthWest Territory, it is proper to announce that the following paper is of the nature of an essay, introductory to the history of the higher educational development in those States, based upon the writer's investigations and monographs upon the other States of the territory, not yet published, the manuscripts of which he has been permitted to examine.

INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.

It is necessary in entering upon the discussion of a subject having no invariable and universal meaning either at all times or in all places at the same time, that the scope and signification of the subject be indicated at the outset. Higher education is a term of this sort, having a very different signification to-day from that of fifty years ago. Even to-day the term, at least as practically applied, comprehends something quite different at Cambridge, or Baltimore, or Ithaca, or Ann Arbor from that at Hiram, or Battle Creek, or Chaddock, or fifty other places in the country.

Without then attempting to set the exact bounds of the term, for purposes of historica study it is within limits to consider the work of all those institutions calling themselves colleges or universities and conferring the traditional baccalaureate degree or some modern variation, but to study in greatest detail those institutions which have unceasingly striven to embody the true university spirit, and whose strivings and achievements have had a more or less noticeable influence in giving shape and character to the higher education of to-day.

The five States of the North-West Territory present features of exceptional interest and importance in the history, development, and attainments of the American higher education. Not that higher educational facilities have developed more rapidly or advanced ideas have spread faster and more widely than elsewhere in the United States, but that owing to certain facts peculiar, in a considerable degree, to the history of the territory, definite results have been attained and tendencies have been started that are exerting important influences outside the limits of the North-West Territory.

These facts may be briefly indicated:

First.-It was in connection with the organization of this territory that the Congress

of the United States first made grants of land for the endowment of educational instr tutions both primary and higher. Thus the question immediately rises as to the ongnal design of Congress in making these endowments and the influence and effects their action upon the development of educational policies.

Second. The territory contains probably the weakest college in the United States that is classed as a State institution, and is controlled and nominally supported by the State, it also posesses the strongest and most successful university in America that has from the outset been controlled by the State and sustained solely by a national grant and the proceeds of State taxation. In consequence a study of the history of the territory shenk disclose some of the conditions precedent to the establishment and successful mainte nance of direct relations between the State and the higher education.

Third.-The territory contains a State which has in operation more colleges than any other member of the Union; while in another State of the territory policy and publi sentiment have apparently tended to check the founding of numerous colleges, while they have favored and fostered a few, and notably the State University and State Agricultural College. A study of this phase of the history of the territory ought to assist in answering the oft repeated query whether the progress of the true higher education is in any marked degree dependent upon the number of colleges within a given area of territory.

Fourth. The territory as a whole-the five States now composing it-show in their history the gradual but steady development of the idea that the interests of the State and of education are conserved by a liberal and hearty support of a State university, controlled by public officers and relying not upon private endowment but upon publie grants and appropriations for their income. There has been a slow but marked disap pearance of the doctrine of laissez faire as applied to higher education and the appearance in its place of the idea of the advisability if not the duty of State support and centralized effort. Not that a State university is to be established and maintained at the expense or detriment of private sectarian or non-sectarian colleges, or with the remotest thought of supplanting them, but that the public education of the youth of a State be gun in the common schools scattered throughout the State, continued in the high schools less numerous and for the most part confined to the cities and towns, may properly be completed, for those who desire to avail themselves of it, at a State university equipped for undertaking such collegiate, university, and advanced special and professional in struction as the collective will of the people may direct.

Much of the history of higher education in the North-West was, however, enacted be fore this idea had received any extensive development or was involved in its development, and the chief preliminary inquiry to be made in an historical study of the subject is, "By what theories and upon what bases have the colleges and universities of the North-West been organized?" The chief purpose of this introductory sketch is to afford a general, and it is hoped satisfactory, answer to that inquiry.

The fact that is apt first to impress the most casual observer of educational matters in the North-West is the existence of a surprisingly large number of colleges in the five States in consideration. The second fact to attract his attention is the unequal distribution of those colleges among the five States. His next discovery, if he continues the examination, will be that in each of the two States that contain far less than their pro portionate number of colleges there is a large and strong State university. In order that these facts may be more clearly evident a few statistics must be given here.

There were in operation in the five States of the North-West Territory in 1886, 93 colleges and universities, conferring degrees, including 5 scientific and technical institutions. There were also 26 institutions for the superior instruction of women, the majority of them conferring degrees, making a total of 119 higher educational institutions, not including any strictly professional schools unconnected with colleges or universities proper.

Of the 93 colleges then in operation 1 was in existence in 1810, 2 in 1820, 7 in 1830, 20 in 1840, 33 in 1850, 58 in 1860, 77 in 1870. Of the 26 women's colleges and seminaries 1 was in existence in 1830, 5 in 1840, 11 in 1850, 19 in 1860, 21 in 1870. Many other so-called colleges have been established that after a fitful eareer have disappeared leaving no traces except a few graduates and considerable indebtedness. In Ohio, for example, 14 universities and 42 colleges were chartered before 1860, of which but 22 are open to-day, showing the death of 34 colleges in that State alone, or more than are living in any other State to-day.

The foregoing statements show, by a little comparison, that the old North-West Territory contains more colleges and universities than are to be found to-day in the thirteen original States of the Union, omitting Georgia and South Carolina, and that if the same ratio according to population obtained as in the eleven original States, the North-West would have but 56 instead of 93 colleges.

Of the 93 colleges 34 are located in Ohio, 16 in Indiana, 25 in Illinois, 10 in Michigan, and 8 in Wisconsin.1

Of these, 9 are in fact or in name State institutions, more or less closely connected with the State, distributed as follows: Ohio, 3; Indiana, 2; Illinois, 1; Michigan, 2; Wisconsin, 1. Of the remaining 84, 11 are non-sectarian in their organization, of which 7 are located in Ohio, 1 in Indiana, and 3 in Illinois. Seventy-three are under the control or patronage of various denominational or sectarian organizations, as follows: In Ohio, 24; in Indiana, 13; in Illinois, 21; in Michigan, 8, and in Wisconsin, 7. Of the institutions for the higher education of women 7 are non-sectarian and 19 are under the = patronage of religious denominations.

Without counting the institutions for the higher education of women Ohio has more colleges and universities than any other State in the Union; Illinois, if she possessed one more college, would rank second, while Indiana holds the seventh place among the States, Michigan twelfth, and Wisconsin sixteenth.

Any adequate interpretation of the history of the higher educational movement in the North-West must explain the causes producing this great diversity in the number of colleges in these States, for it is not accidental nor unimportant. In tracing out such an explanation it will be convenient at the same time to dwell upon the changing relations of the State to higher education, not because the two phenomena are necessarily interdependent (though some may be disposed to consider them as different results of the same set of causes), but because in this way the necessity of twice traversing the field will be avoided.

Down to a point well along in the present century the almost universal belief was that the care of higher educational concerns belonged to and should properly be left in the hands of religious organizations; and the practice corresponded to the belief. Indeed, the recognition of the duty of the State to provide any free and public educational facilities of the lowest type hardly antedated that period in some parts of the country. Ohio was not worse than other States in this regard; yet Ohio, admitted to the Union in 1803, had been a State for twenty years before a tax for common school purposes was authorized; nearly twenty-five years before it was made the duty of the townships to provide schools, and nearly forty years before any State school fund was provided other than that arising from the Congressional land grant. When Ohio was settled a separate department of education in either State or National Government, unless the writer is grossly misinformed, was unknown in American statecraft. As for the higher education there was at that time no college in opcration in America directly subject to State control. A few colleges had received gifts of money or land from the legislature of the colony or State in which they were situated, but they were essentially private colleges so far as their management and policy were concerned, and perhaps the majority were under denominational patronage. Washington, Madison, and a few others desired the foundation of a great national university, and Jefferson had begun his long struggle for a State university in Virginia; but the idea was not often advanced, and was less often accepted,