One of these days England may awake to reap the whirlwind. She is now the only Teutonic nation, and perhaps the only civilized society in existence, in which the bulk of the land under cultivation is not owned by small proprietors.* To her laboring classes she is giving not land, but the spelling-book and the ballot. Speaking of the arms of a slave state, which represented a negro asleep upon a cotton bale, Wendell Phillips once asked, "But what will the people do when the negro wakes up?" Our cousins across the sea can take a similar question to heart. From time to time the English public are aroused to an appreciation of the filth and misery which pervade the dwellings of their poor. Then men rush into print with their various nostrums, emigration, vast schemes of private benevolence, new models for cottages, and the like; but it seldom occurs to any of them to suggest a change in their land laws by which the poor man might own his dwelling. Nothing, however, is so conducive to the self-respect, without which all sanitary regulations are powerless, as the possession of one's habitation.+

Turn now from England to America, and what a dif

See also Gneist, "Hist. of English Constitution," ii. 452. Matthew Arnold says of the nobility and the property question: "One would wish, if one sets about wishing, for the extinction of titles after the death of the holders, and for the dispersion of property by a stringent law of bequest."-Nineteenth Century, Feb., 1885, p. 234. * British Quarterly Review, April, 1886.

"The large domains are growing larger; the great estates are absorbing the small freeholds. In 1786, the soil of England was owned by 250,000 corporations and proprietors."-Emerson's "English Traits," p. 184. A century earlier the number of those who farmed their own land was greater than the number of those who farmed Macaulay, vol. i. chap. iii.

the land of others.

DISTRIBUTION OF LAND IN AMERICA

29

ferent picture is presented! The census of 1880 shows that the farms in the United States number over four millions, of which only about twenty-five thousand contain more than a thousand acres. Of the whole number nearly three fourths are worked by the owners, and of the remainder, the larger part are worked on shares. In 1850, before slavery was abolished, the farms numbered only about a million and a half, and they averaged two hundred and three acres each. In 1880, the average had sunk to one hundred and thirty-four acres, so that while the amount of cultivated land is largely on the increase, the process of subdivision is still more rapid. Practical experience here, as well as elsewhere, shows that small tracts of land are worked more economically than large ones, and are most productive when cultivated by the owner. The above figures take no account of mere city or village lots for building purposes. The number of these is very large, for, as the American knows, the laborer, except in the large cities, usually owns his own dwelling, and thus is a proprietor of the soil. The ownership of land always makes a man conservative. When it is generally divided, as in the United States, and where, under a liberal Homestead Law, any one can obtain a farm by actually putting it under cultivation, there will be found little room for theories of spoliation.*

*The census of 1890 shows only about 73,000 paupers in the poorhouses of the United States, out of a population of over 62,000,000, a relative decrease since 1880. About 6000 of those are colored, and of the whites three fifths are foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Of the poor permanently supported in their own houses or in private families, only some 24,000 are given, but in this case the returns do not pretend to even approximate correctness. Census Bulletin No. 90, July 8, 1891.

Such is the difference between England and America as to the distribution of land. Speaking of this subject, Daniel Webster summed up the case in his great speech at Plymouth, when he said of the New England settlers that "the character of their political institutions was determined by the fundamental laws respecting property." These laws, he said, provided for the equal division of the estate of an intestate among his children, while the establishment of public registration and the simplicity of our forms of conveyance have facilitated the change of real estate among the living.

Next comes the subject of popular education. This is, perhaps, more important than any question of the distribution of property. "Give light, and the darkness will dispel itself." Give education, and everything else will right itself in time. Still, some of the nations of the Old World may discover to their cost that unless other reforms go with the education of the masses, the righting process will seem like the first breaking of light over chaos.

The history of popular education in America is a familiar story. When the Pilgrims from Holland landed at Plymouth, one of their first acts was to establish a common school. The New England Puritans speedily followed their example. In 1647, the Massachusetts Colony passed a law providing that every township of fifty householders should appoint a schoolmaster to teach the children to read and write; and that his wages should be paid by the parents, or the public at large, according to the decision of the majority of the inhabitants. By 1665, every town in Massachusetts had a common school, and, if it contained over one hundred inhabitants, a grammar school. The other New England colonies followed in the wake of Massachusetts. In Connecticut every

X

POPULAR EDUCATION IN AMERICA

31

town that did not keep a school for three months in the year was liable to a fine. Meantime the Dutch had established free schools in New York. This was the beginning of the educational system of the United States. When the Puritan spirit began to decline there was a falling-off in the schools and an increase of illiteracy; but the love of learning never died out, and the free schools never were abandoned. At the close of the Revolution there was donated to the Union the vast domain north of the Ohio and west of the Alleghany Mountains, New York leading off in this generous cession.* In 1785, Congress passed an act reserving for educational purposes the sixteenth section of each township in this public territory. The policy then established has been followed in regard to all subsequent acquisitions, and in 1858 an additional section was granted by the government.† Up to the present time these grants aggregate over seventyeight million acres, a territory larger than the whole of Great Britain and Ireland combined. In 1880, the United States spent eighty-two and a half million dollars on her common public schools, which were estimated to number one hundred and seventy-seven thousand, and in 1889 the expenditure had risen to over a hundred and thirty millions, while the schools had increased to two hundred and sixteen thousand. The census of 1880 showed that in the Northern States only five per cent. of the nativeborn population were unable to read and write.

Now, does any one imagine that America is indebted to England for its free-school system or general scheme

* Magazine of American History, March, 1888, p. 200.

Each township contains thirty-six sections, one mile square. The allotment for educational purposes is therefore, since 1858, one eighteenth of the national domain. Census Bulletin No. 53, 1891.

for the education of the masses? Let us see. While New York was settled by Hollanders, and New England, as we shall see hereafter, largely by Puritans from England tinctured with Dutch ideas, Virginia had a different class of colonists. It is absurd to speak of them as of a better blood than the settlers in the North, for the latter came of the best old Anglo-Saxon stock, and they were made up of the most intelligent as well as the most sturdy and virtuous of their race. But Virginia was settled from a different class of the community. Her colonists, when not convicts or indented servants, were mostly average Englishmen of the Established Church, and, like the average Englishmen, opposed to all innovations in Church or State. So it came about that, in 1671, Sir William Berkeley, the Governor of Virginia, could write to England: "I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years. For learning has brought heresy, and disobedience, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!" There spoke simply the typical English Tory, and the type was to remain unchanged in England for two hundred years to come.

Now turn to the mother country itself, and look at her record. During the reign of Edward VI., some grammar schools-we should now, perhaps, call them Latin or high schools-eighteen for the whole kingdom, were established by the reformers of his government. At various times a few more were added by private individuals. One of these rare schools, founded at Stratford-on-Avon by a native of that town who had gone up to London and become Lord Mayor, bore the name of William Shakespeare on its rolls. But for the good fortune of his townsman he might have died mute and