FRENCH AND AMERICAN REPUBLICAN ISSUES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION HAR- MONIZED BY GUIZOT. Elements of Education common to all Ages and Nations . — Grecian and Roman Republican ideas of education, that rule European and Amer- lca " education to-day, have, in principle, ruled even India, China, a ?»* u “ amme< ^ an ^ s * a “fr° m ti me immemorial.” In the language of Menu, author of the last of the Vedas of India, education is the de- veloping of the mind to apprehend “sarva,” the whole, or every rela- tion of man to things and beings. In the Hebrew of Moses it is indi- cated by “ hanan, ’ to whet, or sharpen the intellectual powers for successful meeting all the issues of existence ; while in Solomon, the term “hamak, to build, supplements primary training enjoined in Moses’ law as the work of the Levites, by that perfected comprehension which has .made, Hebrew training in all ages so effective. The Greek term paideia, or child-training, originally applied to the simplest primary instruction, its officer being, as Herodotus states (viii. 75), the Athenian servant who led the boy to school, came in its verbal root to indicate, as in Vlatos Republic, the most perfected culture in advancing science and art. The Roman designation “educatio,” drawing out or develop- in £’ i. n * er< : nce indicating the parental office of nurturing alike the mind and body of the growing child, came in the culmination of the Roman, as 01 the Grecian Republic, as Cicero indicates, to characterize the man of complete culture ; as seen in his designation : “ Institutus liberaliter educatione doctrinaque, liberally cultured by education and instruc- tion. Vet more; not only the principle but the methods of education have been and now are common in all nations. The visitor to any one 01 the thousand or more of Muhammedan common schools at Constan- tinople nnds the pupils trained to read, that they may imbibe the knowl- edge stored up by men of experience in their own and other ages; to write, that they may be able to express their own wish and thought to others not within the range of the voice ; while the main attainment is e committing to memory of the Koran, which is a compendium of the History, the moral precepts, and the religious doctrines which are to be ll J e ’ r i ulde V? future life. Precisely like to this are the primary schools ot Ghina, which reach every boy who gives indication of mental powers susceptible of high culture. It is according to this universal law that Hebrew education has taken its distinctive character. It is significant as to the perfect embodiment of truth unalloyed that pervades the spirit and gives form to the precepts, as distinct from the doctrines drawn from the letter of the New Testament, that no people or nation has yet been met to whom its teachings have not appeared to be “ common law.” 4.u Education as distinct from Education adapted to capacity . — Here the history of mankind indicates the most important fact relating to practical educational systems. The student of the Institutes of Menu, * he , first of the Twelve Books (sect. 31) this fundamental rule, opposed to law: “ He (the Creator) caused the Brahmin, the Cshatriya, the Vaisya, the Sudra (so named from scripture, protection, wealth, and labor), to proceed from his mouth, his arm, his thigh and his foot.’ Hence education, or comprehensive culture/treated in the second book, based in every respect on the Vedas, is only for the first class, the Brah- mins ; while, as succeeding books indicate, only “ military tactics ” be- longs to the training of the second class, “ industrial economy ” to the third, and no training at all to toilers with the hand and foot. On the other hand, among the Chinese, though ruled by one wing of the Northern Tartar race, as Turkey is ruled by another under military despotism, education properly is the heritage of all the people; since any boy who shows capacity is by public provision made eligible to enter upon and pursue the studies of each succeeding grade, until he attains the highest, and is subject for appointment to the highest civil as distinct from political office of the Empire. Coming to the Grecian system, the ideal Republic of Plato becomes palpable in its fanciful provisions ; founded on the theoretic necessity that in order to the highest development there be just such a proportion of teachers, law- makers and judges, of merchants and artisans, and of field and house laborers, country and city menials ; and hence that there must be a class most highly cultured who should by arbitrary supervision maintain this proportion. It was a necessary corollary from this theorem that in order to the equal division of property and its distribution as in army- messes, there should be community of wives and children as of property. Yet more, a suggestion from which humanity would shrink unless it were stated, this system provided that by “ infanticide ” the children in- capable of entering either of these classes should like lower animals be removed as a burden to community. Had not this very idea been reconceived in the French revolution, its character, as its suggestion, would have doubtless been forgotten. For, the overshadowing of Aristotle’s comprehensive analysis of all human relations to things and beings became so perfect in its systematizing of the sciences and arts, whence he deduced his philosophic applications to the family, the city, the State, and to international and religious relations, that it has ruled, after occasional experiments of partial theories, all advanced nations. The systems of primary, secondary, and university education founded on this balanced philosophy is specially distinguished by its discrimi- nation between material “ equality ” and moral “ equity.” In the same family, one son, perhaps a younger, develops a mental capacity which makes him fitted to be the head of a business in which his brothers may be subordinates ; as in the Webster family, the elder fitted to manage the farm, the younger to rule a Senate. The patriarchal sys- tem, early illustrated in the families of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, preserved to this day alike by the native Chinese of eastern Asia and the Christian communities of western Asia, guards this law of nature and allows its rule. That law, a century before Plato and Aristotle wrote, was already ruling in the Roman Republic; whose leaders had borrowed its principal Applications from the code of Solon, the Athe- nian Republican legislator. It was at the foundation of Roman educa- tional institutions, which have ruled all European educational institu- tions under Christian supervision ; whose excess of development is prob- ably to-day appearing in the limitless technical, special, and even in- dustrial departments now classified as parts of university education. The rule of this general principle is seen in the remark of Tacitus, to have lived and ruled under the most rigid Imperial sway : “ Dominum et servum nullis educationis deliciis dignoseas ”; master and servant, by no refinements of education mayest thou detect. Mediceval Approximation to Modern Systems of Education . — The master- analyzer of this age was Guizot. Since he with discrimination makes France the centre illustrating the progress of civilization, and since civilization progresses with the general culture that is developed by common education, the briefest glance only at other countries is 3 required. The Roman conquest scarcely penetrated beyond the Rhine ; certainly not into the Germany graphically pictured by Tacitus. In Britain, as the “ Agricola ” of Tacitus indicates, the moulding influence became permanent ; and in the Western Isles, as Iona, Roman educa- tion sowed seeds of truest culture. In Spain, while the Goths ruled the North, in the South the power of common culture to guard the Republic of Letters was triumphant. As Mohammed himself had as his teachers, a cultured Hebrew and a true Christian Greek, so the first two visions of his Koran prepared the way for the perpetuation, and in six Centuries later the culmination, of an education really Grecian and Roman in the Colleges of Bagdad on the Euphrates, and of Cor- dova in Spain. Europe can never forget, that for the sciences of Alge- bra and Chemistry, her people are indebted to the Arab race whose names they bear. The meeting of Averrhoes, Maimonides, and Aquinas, as associate learners and teachers, gives a lesson for our times. Stages of Educational Progress in France . — While Guizot’s History of Civilization makes France the true centre of dawning progress, Charlemagne’s educational work links it to Germany, and the conquest of William the Norman to England. It was just at the era of this second event that the second stage in the advance of French educa- tional systems arose. Charlemagne’s wise and personally supervised system, reaching the people at large with primary education, prepared the way for the select aspiring minds. This developing of its demand made the University a necessity and gave it a patronage. In the year 1:252, less than two centuries after the Norman occupation of England, and when the impulse given to thought during the Crusades had cul- minated in the co-operation of Hebrew, Christian, and Muhammedan scholarship in the south of Spain, Robert de Sorbon, then fifty years of age, and specially in the confidence of Louis IX., originated that Institution called after him by the feminine title “ The Sorbonne.” Robert’s idea was that which from his day has ruled in the Colleges of •Europe and of America. As the instructors who reached the people were those who came up from their ranks, as those instructors like the Levites in the Hebrew State were ecclesiastics, as the higher instruc- tion of the College was excluded from the aspirations of those who could not pay the required fees, Charlemagne’s provision of free tuition to the people in primary instruction was extended to College training. That Institution, with its Lecture System supplemented by catechet- ical drawing out of the pupil, and yet more by questions of the pupil drawing out the teacher, not only attracted, but developed the ablest teachers of France ; Guizot himself being the culminating example. Down to the Revolution under Louis XVI., “ The Sorbonne ” was -the saving guardian in French education for the people ; their true teach- ers and statesmen being there trained. Reform in Higher French Education under Louis XIV., by Rot tin . — Early under Louis XIV. the conflict of philosophic theories, material and spiritual, and their harmony in the actual and practical union of both revived. This was illustrated in India when the practical, be- cause balanced analysis and reasoning of Kapila and Gotama, harmo- * nized the opposing materialistic and mystic theories of the early Vedic masters. It appeared more fully, and for all time, when elaborated by Aristotle amid the partial theories of Democritus and Pythagoras, each reduced to absurdity in the keen discussions of Socrates, reported by i the theoretic Plato and practical Xenophon ; all of which, Indian and Grecian, went into the crucible and took solid form in the analysis of Aristotle. These theories, severally manifest in the two Hebrew apostles of Jesus, John and James, but harmonized in Paul the later and balanced apostle to the Greeks, culminating in the discussions of Augustine and Pelagius in the fifth century of Christian history, awoke 4 to intensest energy in the age when Montesquieu, in the masterly anal- ysis of his “ Esprit des Lois,” was elaborating those principles which became the study of the founders of the American Republic. The successive lives of four men must be brought into rapid review that the balanced result, mighty in its influence and in its growing power over three or four generations, may be appreciated in the systems of edu- cation that have ruled the American Republic from its origin, and now rule that of France. In 1630, Jansen, born in Holland in 1585, educated at Utrecht, be- came eminent as a Professor of Biblical Theology. Partaking the spirit of Augustine just after his early conversion, and before his Old Age Confessions, and ruled by the spirit of controversy, Jansen aroused at the Sorbonne bitter antagonisms ; which, as always, soon became per- sonal in the monastic brotherhoods of the Gallic Church. When op- posed, Jansen, the leader in controversy, sought the alliance, always injurious to truth, of the Spanish monarchs then specially favorable from policy to Holland interests. The conflict of opinions, with its demoralizing influence on the character of education ruled from the Sorbonne, exerted its disorganizing influence for a century and a quar- ter ; till subdued and harmonized to a great extent in the ripe old age of Rollin. About twenty years after Jansen’s first agitation at the Sorbonne, his treatise, “ De Interioris Hominis Reformatione,” on the Reformation of the Inner Man, attracted the attention of Pascal, born 1623, and then less than thirty years of age. In early boyhood Pascal was in- spired with the love of the higher mathematics ; and in youth he wrote a treatise on the “ Conic Sections,” which won the praise of Descartes. Soon after, Torricelli’s studies in Physics, under Galileo, drew his at- tention to the laws of the pressure of fluids, which led to the invention of the barometer ; and under the united influence of scientific and re- ligious conviction, Pascal wrote a treatise on the Cycloid, which is a masterpiece alongside the work of Newton, his contemporary ; and he added a “ Calculus of Probabilities,” yet more wonderful in its analysis. Drawn into the controversy of Jansen’s followers, Pascal’s “ Provincial Letters ” partook of the faults of Augustine’s extreme reasonings, while his “ Pensees,” or “ Thoughts on Religion,” has proved to all minds like the “ Confessions of Augustine in Old Age like also to “The Defence of Socrates,” when, at seventy, he was arraigned before the Athenian Senate, and his “ last discourse ” in the Phaedo. As Cicero said he could never restrain his tears while reading Socrates’ logical reasonings as to the Divine Being and future life, subdued by the tender spirit which brought him nigh to the condemned Grecian sage, so amid the excite- ment of the French Revolution, men like Rousseau and many a liberal religionist of our day have expressed admiration of, and have found solace in the perusal of “ Pascal’s Thoughts.” Next in order, and special remoulder in French education, came Rol- lin ; whose works, admired and copied as models in England, have done more than those of any French author to make American education become what a Republican people need and seek. Born in 1663 at Paris, trained at the Sorbonne, Professor there from 1694 to 1712, charged with Jansenism, which had become linked to Calvinism, and displaced for a time, his balanced judgment, his harmonizing spirit, and the realized fact that no one like Rollin could secure alike the con- fidence of parents, of students, and of court counsellors, led Louis XIV. to recall him in 1720, and make him Director of Public Instruction. Added to the impulse given to science by men like Descartes and Pascal, it was Rollins mission to call back pure and perfected studies in Belles-Lettres and the Greek as well as Latin classics. Here his chastened taste, his high-toned moral instincts, his genuine piety, s brought about reforms which seemed impossible in the presence of the voluptuous court of Louis. But the Sorbonne, under Rollin, with all the power of the later University, became a green-Eden retreat, no- ticed by visitors of the age, who have left their records preserved amid the Sodom-plain around, like the refuge saved for Lot at Zoar. Rollin was remarkable for testing his work by practical demonstration before he published his results. His “Traitedes Etudes," or “Treatises on Studies," and his “Ancient History," were written between the ages of sixty and seventy-five years; his death occurring in 1741, when he was eighty. The “ Treatise on Literary Studies " is still a model ; a single illustration attesting. Rollin reached fundamental principles. He opposed the system of committing and reciting Latin selections, especi- ally the acting of scenes in Terence. First, quoting Cicero and Ouinc- tilian, that the style of speaking belonging to the actor on the stage is so different from that of the orator that it has to be unlearned in order to success in reaching men practically in public life, Rollin thus showed that the time was wasted and spent in such training. Second, he argued that it weakened the power of the mind to grasp the thought and assimilate both the reasoning and the culture which was the chief aim of classic study; the long required preparation for dramatic exhi- bitions, diverting from connected and analytic mastery of the classics. Third, and most earnestly, he objected to the artificial semblance of youthful affection ; young men dressing in female costume, while the relations of domestic union were made so sensual that insincerity and grossness came to characterize and rule the pure spirit of young men brought from the purity of rural homes, and seduced by Court licen- tiousness. Rollin’s “ Ancient History ” was written from the very oppo- site point of view of Gibbon, the latter being compiled about half a century later, between the years 1783-93, at Lausanne, Switzerland. Rollin’s work was a true and faithful study for youth ; not to entice to “ the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," against which Tacitus as a scathing critic, and John as a loving father, in the same age, raised the voice of remonstrance ; but to bring out, as did Xenophon, alike in his “ Cyropedia ” and his “ Memorabilia,” the ngble virtues which ever have animated aspiring youth ; aspirations too oft forgotten, as Aristotle noted in his pupil Alexander, when men of genius come to power. While Rollin still lived these works of his old age became text-books even in England. The admiration they awakened arose under George II., only a few years after the British Constitution had taken its present stable provisions, embodying the principles on which, under George III., Burke, in 1774 and ’75, defended the resistance of the American Colonies, and which were embodied by Jefferson in the argument of the American Declaration, adopted July 4, 1776. The Archbishop of Rochester wrote these appreciative eulogi- ums to Rollin in Latin, under date 6° Kal., Jan., 1731 : “The services rendered (numera) in the books issued by thee in late years (nuperis a te annis) seem to me of rare worth, and specially to your honor. Though I had devoted much time and care in cultivating such studies, I con- fess that you are the best of masters (optimum magistrum). When I read and reread (legam et relegam) your volumes, I am instructed by you not only in things of which I was before entirely ignorant, but also in those in which I fancied myself to have been before learned. You have, therefore, too modest an opinion of your work v/hen you declare it* composed solely for the instruction of youth In your frequent accord with Xenophon you so write that, in my judgment, had Xeno- phon known French (si Gallice scisset Xenophon), he yrould have used no other words in his argument than you have selected.” The view of Rollin’s influence on French education is incomplete without mention of its inspiring influence on Montesquieu, who gave 6 modern shape to now ruling Constitutional Republican Government. Born in 1689, drinking in the sprit of Rollin, whom he quotes, devoting himself to politics, withdrawing, in 1726, from his seat in Parliament that he might prepare himself for more effectual influence, he spent some years in Italy, Germany, and England. In 1734, while the Ency- clopaedists were perverting history, misleading the people, and going to extremes, he issued his “ Causes of the Decline and Fall of the Ro- mans of which Gibbon’s work, fifty years later, was at once an expan- sion and a perversion. In 1748, after twenty years of exhaustive prepa- ration, he issued that master-work, “ Esprit des Lois,” Spirit of Laws, which has been to European and American statesmen what Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, and Economics had proved for ages preceding. He goes back at once to Aristotle’s idea that the family is the natural guide to organized society ; that the patriarchal, or a selected father, seen in all early Asiatic and European history, is the first and true ideal ; that kingly rule is only needed in war, which is the excep- tional state of society ; that aristocracy is the rule of the men best in capacity, perverted only when it becomes plutocracy or a rule of the wealthy, or timocracy , a rule of hereditary title. Democracy is cor- rupted only when it leaves the administration of law and government to the momentary impulse of the populace, swayed too often by design- ing demagogues, which Aristotle personally studied while the Grecian States were, by its unbridled control, brought under the Imperial rule of Philip of Macedon. Since each of these forms of government are those to which communities subject themselves for their own interests, the “ aristocracy ” or rule of men eminent for leadership in promoting the “ Common-wealth ” (Latin, “ Res-publica,” in Greek, “ ta koina tes Politeias,”) and in securing its protection either by moral or military control, — the best government must embody these three ideas : the power of selection from the best men, or “ aristocracy,” must be the first element; second, the unlimited authority of the “ military ruler” must be granted during the limited period of his selection ; third, the people at large, the “democracy,” must have a voice in the selection, since then, during his limited rule, the very men who selected him are committed to fidelity in his support. This fundamental idea, interwoven into all its applications, should have ruled France. For, the principles of Aristotle rested on eternal laws which, when he wrote, he had seen tested in Athens under Solon and at Rome under the Republic. Of those laws, tested four centuries and more, Cicero thus wrote, in his “ Laws ” (De Legibus, II. iv.) : “ The impulse which directs to right conduct and deters from crime is not only older than the annals of nations and of cities, but coeval with that Divine Being who oversees and rules both heaven and earth. Tarquin none the less violated that eternal law, because in his reign there was no written law against such violence ; for the principle that impels us to right action and warns us against guilt, springs out of the nature of things. It did not begin to be law when it was written ; but when its principle had its first being ; and that was coeval with the Divine Mind itself.” Again he says : “ There is indeed one true and original law, conformable to reason and to nature, diffused over all, invariable, eternal, which calls to the fulfillment of duty, and to the abstaining from injustice ; and which calls with a voice that is irresist- ible in authority wherever it is heard. The law cannot be abolished, nor restricted, nor affected in any of its sanctions by any law of men. A whole Senate, a whole people, cannot dispense one from its para- mount obligation. It requires no commentator to render it distinctly intelligible ; nor is it different at Rome and at Athens, nor at the pres- ent and in future ages ; but in all times and in all nations it is and has been and will be, one and everlasting ; one as that God, its great author 7 and promulgator, who is the common sovereign of mankind, is Himself one. No one can disobey it without flying, as it were, from his own bosom, and denying his own nature ; and in this very act he will inflict on himself the severest of retributions, even though he escape what is commonly called punishment.” That “ eternal law ” had ruled England before Montesquieu wrote ; for Whewell, author of the “ History of the Inductive Sciences,” in his “ Morality and Polity,” issued in i860, traced back their recognition to the Act of Parliament deposing James II. That law did rule from the first the American fathers ; as Nathaniel Chipman, LL.D., in a volume issued at Burlington, Vt., in 1833, going back to Aristotle, has shown. So, too, England should be ruled now by the counsels of men who thought with Montesquieu, borrowing his ideas, seeking their tests where he did in such works as Plutarch’s Lives, and linking his studies for mature men with those made by Rollin and embodied in his An- cient History for Youth. So, too, those counsels of the American fa- thers founded on eternal laws should have ruled — doubtless we must say it — thirty years ago in our Republic. The point to note is; that systems of education then lay and now lie at the foundation of public security. Guizot’s Life fitting him for his Survey. — Guizot was born in the South of France in 1787. His father, a Protestant lawyer, fell a victim to the atheistic anarchy which ruled the opening revolution in 1794. Wit- nessing as a youth the atrocities wrought by all the factions of the mis- named Republic, he commenced the practice of law under Napoleon I. in 1805 ; publishing masterly papers from 1809 on public affairs. At Napoleon’s fall he was made Secretary of the Interior ; but in 1820 re- tired and devoted himself to lectures in the Sorbonne and contributions to the “ Revue Francaise,” which culminated in his “ History of Civil- ization in Europe.” On the fall of Charles X., the last of the Bour- bons, in 1830, Guizot, under Louis Philippe, the elected Constitutional monarch, was recognized as the man of all others fitted for any and successively for all posts of influence. Yielding to the demand he be- came a member of the Chamber of Deputies till 1832 ; then because the training of the new generation was to lay the foundation of future stability, he accepted position at the head of the Bureau of Public Instruction till 1836. Having completed this fundamental home mis- sion, he accepted the post of Minister to England for a year. Finally, as Prime Minister till the restored Republic of 1848, his influence was harmonizing in all departments. When the “plebiscite” made Louis Napoleon Emperor, his private influence in his retirement' was still moulding, and his studies and published writings were continued till his decease, in September, 1874, at the age of eighty-seven years. It was during this period that he elaborated in eight volumes his “ Memoirs of my own Time one of these volumes being devoted to his four years as head of the Bureau of Public Instruction. Meanwhile, too, he edited a French edition of the “ Life and Writings of Washing- ton introducing it by an Essay on the Colonial History, the rights of the Revolution, and the character of Washington, so impartial, so bal- anced, so free from both English and American prejudice, that its in- troduction as a text-book with his History of Civilization in Europe, is an American demand. The chaotic condition of Public Education at his entrance on this office of fundamental importance, the three ele- ments of difficulty specially harmonized, and their American parallels, are the points for closing survey; for which the previous paragraphs are a necessary preparation. French Education from 1790 to 1830, as traced by Guizot. — Ruled for centuries by the State-Church, which was French Catholic substan- tially Roman in supervision, the Revolution as studied by Burke and 8 by the American fathers in the first amendment to the United States Constitution, swept like a tornado through class-rooms of primary and halls of higher education. The “Constituent Assembly,” ruled by Talleyrand, adopted measures whose foreshadowing led Burke before- hand to declare in the British Parliament : “ I see propagated prin- ciples which will not leave to Religion even toleration, and will make Virtue itself less than a name which principles prompted the Amer- ican States, as one, not only to forbid to Congress power to establish a State-Church, but also to “ prohibit the free exercise of religion.” That first Revolutionary body, whose rule for a year brought in a counter rule, left education in chaos. The second, the Legislative Convention, fastened on the first term of the triple watchword, “ Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.’ This Assembly provided that any and every teacher be left to his own freedom in choice and conduct of studies. But this idea brought in a confusion to which parents could not be expected long to submit. The third stage, inaugurated by the National Convention, at the sugges- tion of Daunou, framed a system of education rigidly ruled by the second watchword. “ Equality.” They established a theoretic system, to rule in all schools, arranged by a Committee who soon came to bear the popular term of reproach, “ The Academic Church.” It permitted no teacher to instruct any pupil in any other than the studies pre- scribed, while all parents were required to send their children to the schools thus organized. Under Napoleon the present University system was organized. Guizot compliments highly the civil administration, as distinct from the political rule and military ambition, of Napoleon. The Code Napoleon even Prussia afterwards adopted as the best embod- iment of the civil law; while the “ University” of France, which came to rule education, was wise in principle, and at first equitable in admin- istration. The antagonisms of political parties, however, monarchical and republican, and yet more the rivalries of Protestants and Catholics, with the revival also of doctrinal controversies between different or- ders of the same Church, rendered the administration of the University ineffective for the country and inadequate to the people’s demand. Coming into power, Guizot saw three obstacles to harmony. First, in the primary department, religious instruction, and especially Bible reading and interpretation, required adjustment. This he sought to meet by Scripture selections, presenting Bible history and precepts acceptable to all ; catechetical teachings which abstained from doc- trinal controversies ; and a form of prayer, which like the Lord’s prayer, men of any religious faith could make their own. Second, in secondary instruction, a history especially of their own country, with all its recent contradictory counsels and enactments, — a demand at once imperative and yet apparently unattainable, was studied ; and by his balanced skill it was attained. Third, for the higher University study, a history of philosophy, ancient and modern, true to history and yet satisfactory to differing ecclesiastics, to opposing politicians, and above all to sceptical religionists, was the last and most difficult work. This, however, was accomplished by combining French and English studies of the Vedas and of Brahmin ic theories, by giving due place to each stage and phase of Grecian philosophy, by stating facts at every era of Christian interpretation, leaving out no name or principle how- ever controverted. The work thus prepared was for the University of Paris and for the Colleges of France. When these several provisions were completed, a Manual was sent, Guizot states, to no less than 39,300 “ masters,” with requests for com- ments or suggestions. Flattered to be consulted from so high a source, the Protestant harmonizer under a Catholic State-Church received 13,850 full approvals; while acquiescence was almost universal. American Educational Precedents and Present Aims. — Guizot, at the 9 opening of his suggestion as to his own proposals, commends much in the English system and more in the system “ des Etats Unis”; which had proved truer to old Grecian, Roman, and French precedents. The American leaders had studied in such works as Plutarch’s Lives and Rollin’s Ancient History the systems of education tested to be adapted to safety by Republican institutions. Jefferson, who was a special student of authors who preceded the French Revolution, Franklin, who had imbibed English Liberal and Adams Puritan principles, were of one mind in declaring man’s “ inalienable rights ” to be those with which he is “ endowed by his Creator.” Immediately after the war’s close, Jefferson wrote to Adams for the details of New England com- mon-school education, that he might introduce them into Virginia ; expressly stating : “ No one can object to the teaching of the words of Jesus.” The Constitution of the United States recognized the Chris- tian day of religious rest ; giving Sunday exemption from public service to the President ; and so directly implying that it is the universal American law that all departments of Government, State and National, have without exception taken it. The “ common law ” is declared ruling ; of which “ Christian precept ,” as to marriage, profanity, and other moral and religious relations and obligations, to be carefully dis- tinguished from Christian “ doctrinal interpretations,” has ruled in every American court, as lately regarding polygamy ; and while, too, its con- stitutional authority, by the highest law-authorities, as Kent, has been declared to be in force, and of course to be taught in American col- leges. Assuredly if France could be furnished select Scripture read- ings and a common prayer acceptable to all, in America, where select lessons for Sunday-schools, International as well as National, are univers- ally acceptable, and where members of all Christian communions vie in their courtesies of inviting and accepting attendance alike on syna- gogues and churches not of their own faith — assuredly this demand can be met. As to the second, a “History” universally acceptable, this simple sugges- tion is amply sufficient as a guide. The acts of men under sudden ex- citement, often misrepresenting public sentiment, misguiding followers of an hour by partial statement of facts and misjudgment of motives — these acts of sudden impulse are to be distinguished from the calm, settled, grounded, and ordinarily ruling convictions of the people at large. The two exhibitions are as unlike — the experience of American cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans alike attesting — as the local tornado of an exceptional hour and valley is unlike the three hundred and sixty-five days of life-giving and fruit- maturing sunshine and genial breezes covering a continent. All re- ligionists have occasion to guard 1 against partial statement of facts, illogical conclusions, and unjust judgments. The martyrdom of Soc- rates at Athens, of Jesus at Jerusalem, of Bruno at Rome, of Servetus at Geneva, and of Burroughs at Salem, arose from the natural convic- tion in ages and locations where political loyalty and religious alliance were at once inseparable and specially intolerant because of the pre- vailing spirit of revolution ; and the French revolution but repeated the fact that the denial of all religious faith puts no limit to intolerance and bloodshed, since religious faith of any type links men of the most opposite convictions by a bond that puts a limit, because it has a redeeming aim, to its inquisition. Men of differing interpretations of a mutually accepted and advocated constitution have, in our day and land, had such a demonstration in fratricidal immolation by a few rival political priests of hecatombs of the noblest youth, as makes real the fable of the Minotaur, as also the allied maxim that war, like horse- racing, “ is the pastime of princes.” The recent citation of the fact, that in Wall Street during the War for the Union, the “ bulls and 10 bears ” bet on slaughters in battles as on game-cocks in the pit, attests that even money-greed, “ sales in the shambles,” is a stimulus to the immolation. But , he that cites these acts of individuals as true indices of the people’s intelligence, virtue, and self-respect, will soon find him- self, as in a noted instance, met in his own circle by a derisive chal- lenge. For, the briefest recalling of facts as to the four wars of the American States, centering in the social question of personal liberty and equality, and in the political issue of loyalty to existing govern- ment, permits clear vision, above the smoke of battle and the cries of martyred brothers, of these headlands that mark the rock pillars of fundamental truth. When the protracted struggle which culminated in the war for American Independence was opening at Boston, and one noble African servant fell in defense of the white man’s right, this counterpart soon appeared. The Boston Gazette of July 12, 1776, which had then received the Declaration adopted July 4th, at Philadelphia, filled two pages and more with the argument in proof of two “ self- evident” facts : that “all men are created equal,” and that all “govern- ments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This “ Declaration ” is immediately followed by the advertisement of a run- away slave, whose owner describes his marks and offers a reward for his recovery, without any apparent public thought that this son of Adam was not considered an “ equal ” or allowed to “ choose ” his gov- ernor. Yet more, the “royalists” were for a time the true “loyalists.” Still more, in the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, Art. I., sect, ix., clause 1, was designed to meet the “ equitable ” claims of two extremes, Southern and Northern ; the one needing African tillers of the soil, and the other having the ships built to bring them from the African coast. Again, in the second war, that for American “ equality ” among the nations, when the industrial and commercial interests of the former New England Union were specially affected, and at Hartford, in De- cember, 1814, the restoration of that Union was seriously considered, it was not strange that the precedent was cited, when fourteen years later the interests of South Carolina were so seriously affected by the tariff of 1828, and when for four years no relief was obtained despite Web- ster’s eloquent tribute to South Carolina and the conscientiousness of her high-minded citizens, till Clay’s spirit of compromise reknit the bonds of Union. Yet again, when the admission of Texas led to the third war, that with Mexico for American “comity,” since the success- ful candidate for the Presidency in i860, was from 1846 to 1848 a Rep- resentative in Congress, and in his opposition to the measures which then prevailed, he took the very position as to State-rights which the Gulf States were taking, it was not strange that as President, with over- ruling official devotion to the Union, he and his Cabinet so long breasted opposition in order to harmonize opposers. When finally, true index to the “ history ” Americans demand, the fourth war, that for American “ Union,” came, these historic facts were made more demonstrative than ever before in the chronicles of nations. The pages of Thucydides and of later Grecian writers were scanned ; and the horrors of slave-insurrections during the Peloponesian war, togeth- er with the fatal result of State disunion, ending in an Imperial despot- ism to this day maintained over the most cultured nation of history, were reviewed. In this whole history failure of fidelity to the “ sym- machia,’’ or war-league, and the penalty of violated interstate law, fills alike the fifth book of Herodotus and the entire volume of Thucydides ; while the ringing epithet, “ paraspondos,” untrue to compact, alike echoed from the lip of Demosthenes and the page ‘of Thucydides, was a warning voice for all time to calm seekers of compromise. Yet more, the Roman term “foederati,” federated, recognized from Caesar’s day by Roman writers as the invincible safeguard of the leagued mountain I tribes of the Helvetii in the valleys of the Alps, the denunciation by Cicero of “fcedi frangi,” or compact-breakers, in the Roman Republic, the provisions of the civil code of Justinian as to “ foederatici,” or citi- zens of tribes “ federated,” the repeated instances when from local interests Swiss cantons contemplated separate commercial or military alliances with neighboring Austrian, German, or French powers, for the time overshadowing, and the union of all the other cantons to force back these “ openers of the gates of Thermopylae ” into fidelity to their compact, — these historical parallels were with fresh warning studied. As the war went on, while the negro-wards of New York were raided and the people maltreated, during the entire four years not a case of conflict between whites and blacks, provoked on either side, occurred in all the Southern States ; servants separated from their masters during battles and brought into Washington begged to be re- stored ; the colored people of Petersburgh, Va., had their home-guard to protect their section of the city ; and the servants of General Lee at Arlington, whose church-home was in Washington, in their public positions as porters and janitors would always defend the integrity and loyalty of their master. While this first professed cause for war, the social issue, was thus settled for the recognition of all nations, the political question at issue was more emphatically demonstrated. While the President, with a plurality in his Cabinet of like antecedents, appre- ciated the conscientious conviction of State rather than National al- legiance, the distinction between the old doctrine of “ State-rights,” revived during the past year and made triumphant before the Supreme Court in States whose laws prohibit the sale of intoxicants, the extreme of “ State-disunion ” was made apparent. For, while the extreme States of the South left the Union immediately after the result of the Presidential election in the autumn of i860, for six months the older Southern States clung to the Union, hoping for the avoidance of armed conflict ; till compelled to side either for or against their section. Most significant of all, in the campaign that brought the conflict to a speedy end, it was the claim of “ State-control ” even in common con- flict of arms, that, as in Greece permanently, and in Switzerland occa- sionally, brought the penalty of eternal law; which, either with or with- out compact, is inevitable. Yet once more; when, at the close of the war, one alone of all the leaders, the President of the Confederacy, was held for trial during two years, and the Chief-Justice who was to preside delayed the suit till the great voice of the people, always to be trusted, as Houston, the tower of Southern defense of the Union repeatedly declared, could be heard, this fact, known to his intimates, ruled the delay. That Chief- Justice, as Senator and Governor of one of the new States of the North, through all the discussions that formed parties for ten years preceding the war, had maintained this position : that only the “ original thirteen States ” were bound by the provision of the Constitution pledging the States to restore fugitives ; a position, of course, which would have been cited on the trial, as justifying the new States of the South, to one of which the prisoner on trial belonged, in their claim of exemption from allegiance to other provisions of the Constitution. The application of this statement of facts to a history of the United States for American schools is palpable and manifest. The records in the archives of State and National Governments, as in the Hebrew “Chronicles” of the kings of Israel, may, and must, be made select for the youth of a coun- try and for the instruction of men and nations in all future ages. The superficial and prejudiced student may seek for and find what to him seem contradictions ; while a Grotius, the founder of the modern science of international law, and Greenleaf, whose Laws of Evidence rule American courts, find the two classes of records just the selection to 12 be expected, and perfectly harmonious; indeed, complementary when collated. Clarendon’s “ History of the Rebellion ” of Cromwell, may, of course, be sought by comprehensive students ; but no College or Uni- versity of the United Kingdom of Great Britain would dream of mak- ing it a text-book. So, volumes of the day entitled “ The Rebellion,” written for American readers, may find their place in library alcoves ; but Guizot’s harmony for French youth is the demand now for Ameri- can schools. The question of a system of “Philosophy” which is to rule in American colleges, is yet more vital, as Socrates and Aristotle recognized in the Athenian, and Cato and Cicero in the Roman Republic ; and this was so demonstrated for all the world in the French Revolution that Guizot’s whole energies, and that during his whole life, were bent to it. Aristotle’s definition : “ he philosophia esti he episteme ton epistemon, kai he techne ton technon ” — “ philosophy is the science of sciences and the art of arts,” accepted by all the profound scientists and jurists like Cuvier and Agassiz, like Montesquieu and Guizot, who have mas- tered his connected reasoning, presents this ruling principle. All the relations of man to things and beings are ruled by correlated forces ; and no man is philosophic, as Socrates at seventy, in his last discourse, so earnestly argued, unless he goes back to the “ First Cause.” The Brahminic logic recognized that there must be in every event, material or spiritual, five conspiring causes. The vase never would have existed unless there were : first, the material cause, the clay ; second, the formal cause, the vase-shape ; third, the instrumental cause, the whirl- ing force that gives the rounded form ; fourth, the efficient cause, the potter’s mind ; and fifth, the final cause, or the design or end for which the potter gave the special shape. So Socrates and Aristotle argued, not only as to the vast, rounded universe, but also as to the forms of the rounding flower and fruit, the root and tree trunk. Socrates, in substance, said, so tenderly that his persuasive earnestness, Cicero said, melted him in the mere reading to tears : “ Cebes, when I was young I bent all my energies to observe how forces, back of each other in end- less succession, arose ; but I found no rest till one day I took up a book of Anaxagoras, who said that ‘ Nous,’ Mind, was the ‘ First Cause.’ ” From that hour, he says, he gave up sculpture and thoughts of property and reputation, and lived and argued for one end ; to bring the men, especially the youth of Athens, to believe that all their relations, social, civil, political, and religious, were ruled by Divine power, wisdom, and goodness, and that Divine law should be human law. It is significant, that while recent danger has threatened, six men of Cambridge have successively united to maintain the authority not only of Natural Re- ligion argued demonstratively by Grecian and Roman teachers and statesmen, but also to maintain the Divine authority of the Old and New Testaments, namely, Greenleaf, in jurisprudence; Agassiz, in nat- ural history; Peabody, in divinity; Abbott, in New Testament Greek; Bowen, in Philosophy ; and last, Cooke, in mineralogy and chemistry, his recent volume demonstrating its title, “ The Credentials of Science the Warrant of Faith.” The French Revolution ignored this primary truth, without which chaos would rule in the universe, and does rule in society. Burke, who in his first defense of the Americans in the Brit- ish Parliament, cited a London bookseller, who stated that he sold more copies of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the “ Common Law,” and, with them, “more books of devotion,” than in all the British do- minions besides — Burke cited, in 1790, three years before its fulfillment, the opposite rule in France as the sure precursor of ruin. This ruled profound statesmen from Washington, not excepting Jefferson and Franklin, scores might be named, with whom the Bible was their first, chief, fundamental text-book; the second Adams being but one ex- 13 ample, whose Bible was always found open on his table by visitors as he talked. Just so far as the spirit of the French Revolution, the spirit of superficial, destructive criticism, ignoring the ever-preserved text, the perfect harmony, the entire conformity of all its statements to the law seen to rule nature and man in all happy relations — just so far as Professors in any department treat with superficial and sceptical doubt what men like Grotius, Montesquieu, Guizot, and Greenleaf, have demonstrated by the most rigid scrutiny and most perfect logic to be not only true, but “the truth of all truth," the science of sciences, the art of arts, — so long philosophy will not reign, because it will cease to be taught in our colleges. The harmonious agreement in fundamental philosophical thought of six veteran leaders in American education at the earliest centre of thorough culture in the New World, attests the one “eternal law” to which the freest, widest range of investigation always brings sincere and mature minds. As Professor in the Law Department of Harvard University from 1833, devoting his riper years, from 1842 to 1853, to the elaboration of the “ Laws of Evidence,” which now rule with the English Sharkey in all American courts, the demand recognized especi- ally among law students, led Greenleaf to lay aside in its midst his great work, that he might prepare his volume entitled, “The Testimony of the Evangelists, Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice.” Quoting in its dedication, “ To the Members of the LegalProfession,” the words of Cicero: “ Aut undique religionem tolle, aut usquequaque conserva,” either banish religion entirely, or guard it in every particular, he urged : that, since the members of the legal pro- fession are looked to and are held responsible as the guardians of law, they must be conservators in public opinion of the religious convictions on which the authority of law ever rests ; and hence, they should be both impartial in their investigation, and be guided by the “ laws of evidence,” in analyzing the truths of the Christian religion everywhere recognized, and in judging of the authority of the documents on which its faith rests. Peabody, during a long life, one of the most impartial and reverent instructors in the School of Divinity, not only presents the logical connection of truth in theological science, but also traces the perfect conformity of the Christian faith and the teaching of the Old and New Testaments to the principles of “Natural Religion ” phi- losophically maintained by statesmen and sages ignorant of the New Testament writings. Most of all, unfolding the hidden spring of re- ligious scepticism, he meets especially the prevailing objection that the human mind cannot “comprehend ” the infinite, and hence cannot be ruled by it. He employs the demonstrative induction that rules the mathematician. The mind even of the child “apprehends,” practi- cally, what it cannot “comprehend” theoretically; for every mind recognizes that space must be without limit, since, if with lightning speed for ages, the same line were pursued, no limit of space could be reached, for any supposed limit would itself occupy space. Since, then, everywhere limitless power, wisdom, skill, goodness, and love are mani- fest just so long as the law of man’s relations is sought, guarded, and preferred, and since penalty is but the necessity from violation of law, all the connected truths of natural religion, culminating in the Christian faith, must, by sincere minds, be accepted, reverenced, and copied in man’s life. Agassiz, the pupil of Cuvier, the master in logic in meet- ing St. Hilaire in the French Academy in 1832, — Agassiz, from his first Lectures before the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in 1846, to his last Course in Cambridge, just before his death in 1873, maintained with the fervor of intense conviction, that science must admit and adore the First Cause at every step of development in organic life, plant and animal; his expression, “God’s Plan,” embodying “ that ultimate * 14 philosophy.” Bowen, with Philosophy as his department of exhaustive study for life, roused to the tendencies which were threatening the atheistic denial of all authority which wrecked France despite her Uni- versity and her Academy, unrivalled in brilliance of genius, — Bowen raised the voice of warning against the superficial spirit that ruled the denial of Divine law and of inspired Revelation of that law. Abbott, in his quiet, profound, impartial, and conscientious cloister, roused to remonstrate at the utter undermining of the very foundation of faith in the Old and New Testament Scriptures by unfounded reliance on a few imperfect manuscripts, known to have been laid aside as such that their parchment might some day be used for other purposes, and brought to European libraries only as museum-relics, — Abbott wore out his life, so like to that of the writer he defended, in demonstrating by exhaustive historic research the integrity and Divine authority of the writings of the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” Finally Cooke, in his ten Lectures, entitled “ The Credentials of Science the Warrant of Faith,” reviews first the truths of Natural Religion, citing Galen, the ancient master in human anatomy and hygiene among the Romans, as “ scarcely equalled in modern times next he analyzes the demonstrative process of “ in- duction ”; next he illustrates its method in Newton ; and then, traces how by “ deduction,” the results of induction are made by their application, as in the mathematics and in chemical analysis, to advance human progress and happiness. Reaching thus the “ Laws of Nature ” as the “ laws of God,” he defends, alike, the logic of Agassiz, as applied to the origin of material organisms, and the demonstrative truth of the Chris- tian revelation sustained by “ miracles,” which are but interpositions in the line of Divine creations, which must be admitted in the origin of all successive new flora and fauna ; while, too, they are at once the “ credentials of science ” and the needed “ warrant of faith.” If ever, in the world’s history, true science was made to lead to uni- fied and harmonized philosophy, it has been realized in these six men of Cambridge, raised up, as Henry argued leaders in all ages are called forth, for the defense of material and spiritual law ; forced upon scien- tists, statesmen, and teachers whenever the yearning wants of the people call forth sincere devotion to truth, prompted by the grace that truth always begets. Guizot notes in old age, when daughters and granddaughters were the chief companions of his necessarily secluded life in the house, how parents flocked to consult him on the education of daughters as well as sons. Jefferson’s responsibility as the father of a cultured daughter, exposed amid the social attractions of the University he had founded, gave him broader thoughts; as it gave to Socrates and Cicero, to Newton and Guizot, a philosophy transcending the low range of mere physical science. The present age in Europe is taking cast, in part at least, from this fact : That the sovereign of Great Britain, adored by her people from the day of her accession in 1837 as a girl of eighteen for her virtue and intelligence, called College Pro- fessors to a new responsibility by offering to young women who aspired to it, the truest title to nobility, a Collegiate degree. That influence spread through her daughter, the Empress of Germany, and through the sister of her successor’s wife, the Czarina of Russia, to all Europe. If in our country fathers may be too heedless as to the philosophy that rules in colleges where the thought and character of their sons is re- ceiving bent, no mother will be thoughtless as to the philosophy in- stilled into the developing mind and made to rule the opening life of her daughters. It is to the credit of the University of the State of New York, as a sharer of its counsels for twenty years, accustomed to meet like associ- ations in other States and countries, can intelligently declare — that, as the first true American Bureau of Public Instruction, succeeded by the i5 National Bureau, and now by State Bureaus as far as Texas, whose vol- umes are yearly received and studied, — from its origin in its English youth and in its American growing prime, it has in its Chancellors and Regents shared the wisdom and grace, the science and the art of Guizot. As philosophy is complete only in united and universal induc- tion from observation and in skillful deduction from newly applied arts, as the present year’s progress indicates, attainment yet higher is its aim. If, in the common schools, in academies, in colleges, and in its mission as a University the three aims of Guizot are attained — if at the great centres the ever multiplying special schools do not foster frag- mentary study, — if the sons of the wealthy, who have no mission in life, do not so outnumber the aspiring that both teachers and pupils are checked and thwarted in their mission, so that true culture and its as- pirants shall seek new and more retired resorts, — if the proposed exten- sion, which brings home to true aspirants guides to self-culture, prove true to its intent — if degrees are faithfully conformed to Charter- pledges instead of being lavished on favorites or on persistent appli- cants — if, above all, a reverence akin to that of Grecian and Roman, not to say of French, English, and American fathers of their country, rules, the present Chancellor may realize the mission of Guizot. G. W. SAMSON. Rutgers Female College, New York, July 4, 1891. < | 111 || III III If nil (I III | 3 01 12 0620071 3 < J