Mr. President, I very cordially approve all that is said in the resolutions. I venerate those men, whose hearts were warm, whose doctrines were pure, and whose lives have demonstrated, and now demonstrate, that their hearts, their labor, and their time were consecrated to the high and sacred cause of public education.

Mr. Murphy was warmly responded to by the members of the Board of Education, who expressed their sympathy with the speaker by a spontaneous applause, and the new members were formally qualified for their office.

Thus terminated, forty-eight years after its inception, the career of the Public School Society, leaving its progress and its labors intimately associated with the advancement of all the great institutions of learning and of benevolence which were contemporaneous with its own existence, not less than of the city of which it was an ornament, and upon which it conferred benefits as great as they were invaluable and enduring.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE SOCIETY.

The Lancasterian System-Social Problems-Elevation of the Masses-Educational Systems-Progress and Development-The Public School Society-Visitation and Division of Labor-Economy-Teachers and Salaries-Monitors-Depository— Workshop-Rewards and Libraries-Evening Schools-Vagrancy, Agent, and Visitors-How Shall the Poor be Reached?-Compulsory Measures-The Social Problems Unsolved-The Free and Pay Systems-Pay System Abandoned-Lotteries-Corporal Punishment-Moral Power of the Teacher-Extract from the Manual-Music Introduced, but Discontinued-Moral and Religious InstructionSectarianism-The Position of the Society-Sunday Schools and their InfluenceReligious and Moral Education Essential to the Welfare of Society-Concluding Observations.

THE system of instruction adopted by the Society at its ori gin, was that which had been introduced to the notice of the British public by Joseph Lancaster, and which became known by his name, although, as a characteristic style, it was also called the Monitorial System of Instruction. The Lancasterian method was the basis, but was modified and improved materially in the schools of the Society. It was based upon two fundamental propositions-emulation and economy. It aimed to excite the mental and moral activities, by the distinction it bestowed upon the more industrious and advanced pupils, by their appointment as monitors; while the economy of this kind of service was obvious, where a moderate cost was an essential element in the prosperity of a school, especially for the poor. There is a class of duties not very high, nor requiring a great degree of literary attainment, which may be performed by the higher grade of pupils, which, while the exercise of instruction becomes a decided benefit to themselves in many respects, renders unnecessary the employment of adult and experienced teachers. Children learn easily from one another; and the alphabet, simple spelling, the primary rules of arithmetic, and other lessons are quickly taught and as well learned by the children as though

they were pointed out by the finger of the philosopher. The dignity of the office of monitor, filled by rotation, in the several duties of the school-room, was an incentive to those old enough, while it seemed to invest the monitors with that degree of authority which made the discipline of a class of ten or twelve pupils as easy to them as to an adult teacher.

To the ignorant, any progress whatever in the acquisition of knowledge is valuable, and hence the teachings of advanced pupils were of as much consequence to the learners as though they were under more competent control. Although it was an economical system, it did not cheapen knowledge, in an obnoxious sense; it merely gave, in its least expensive presentation, and through the hands of equals, those first draughts from the fountains of knowledge which otherwise had been denied to the masses of the lowly.

Although the questions of the social and moral elevation of the masses have engaged the attention of the most profound thinkers of the civilized world during the present century, it is a no less conspicuous fact that the condition of millions seems to serve as a barrier to their advancement. Notwithstanding all the expenditures made in this direction for asylums, schools, and gymnasiums, the underlying mass of the community suffers from intellectual darkness and moral death.

There is a tendency in many institutions, after having passed through their early stage, and endowments increase, to enter upon a transition period, which carries them beyond the sphere for which they were originally designed. The ragged school becomes a school for children well clothed, and of the middle class. The rooms in which the poor learned their alphabets, become filled with the children of parents who desire them to read history, grammar, and algebra, if not higher branches. The teacher who first gathered his group of unwashed and reckless urchins, gives place to the tutor who has his maps, his atlases, and his lexicons. This advance is not simply progress; it is substitution. One class of pupils is replaced by another, and a new order of charities is required for the benefit of the humbler classes. This transition has taken place, to a large extent, in the city of New York. The schools of the Society, which were founded for the instruction of those "poor children who did not belong to, or were not provided for by, any religious society,"

and were consequently not provided for by any parochial school, after the lapse of about twenty years, became so numerous and respectable as to excite the attention of the public at large, as institutions for general instruction. It became an object of earnest care with the Society to elevate the character of the schools in all their aspects. They were known as schools for "poor children," and many parents did not desire to send their children to schools which were distinctively for that class. To remove these disadvantages, the system was developed by a long and careful process. Additional endowments were secured, experienced teachers took the place of many of the monitors, more costly apparatus was purchased, the grade of instruction was advanced, and the schools were offered to the public as institutions where the children of all classes might meet on common ground, and engage in the strife for honor and reward.

But social laws cannot always be overborne, even by the most enlightened and philanthropic adaptations. In proportion as the comfortably-clad and cleanly and polished pupil makes his appearance, the opposite class shrink from the contact. Social affinities are too strong, and social distinctions are too marked. Contrasts are too plainly seen. Although theories of popular commingling may be very pretty exercises for the sycophant or the demagogue, facts and truths of a stern and impressive significance often laugh them to scorn, and the self-consciousness of the poor, the abject, and the desponding, lead them to avoid associations where the silent but not less powerful invidiousness of social contrasts is so clearly displayed.

The progress of substitution, of which mention has been made, has taken place to a large extent in the school system of New York. Instead of confining itself to the instruction of the children of the poor, the advances made raised them, in a measure, above the level of thousands who are too unfortunate and too dependent, while the means which would support several schools of lower grades were expended upon a single school. The necessity of securing a system by which children of all classes might meet on common ground, rendered it inevitable that the schools should be advanced to such a rank as very soon removed them beyond the level of thousands. The private pay schools became fewer in number in proportion to the population, and the number of uneducated children of the poor kept stead

ily increasing with the population. The statistics which were viewed with so much interest and anxiety in 1825, when about ten thousand children were estimated to be without instruction, lost none of their significance in 1835, when it was reported that there were twenty thousand untaught wanderers to be found in the streets. Yet this mass grew, in the next decade, to thirty thousand, and, in 1855, the estimates reported to the Board of Education made the number of vagrant and uneducated children reach the appalling figure of sixty thousand, in a resident population of less than seven hundred and fifty thousand.

While this vast increase was going on with the steady accretion of thousands annually added to the ranks of the children of the school age, the system rolled up the amount of its expenditures from the sum of $125,000, distributed by the Society, to the $300,000 apportioned under the care of the Board of Education; and even this liberal fund was increased so rapidly, that the last-named census of children who were non-attendants at schools was contemporaneous with an outlay of over eight hundred thousand dollars for the schools under the care of the Board of Education. The modest and yet substantial houses of the Public School Society were superseded by imposing edifices erected at great cost, as well for the buildings as for their appointments. The grade of instruction had been so far advanced, that, in place of the elementary training of early years, the course comprised music, French, algebra, history, and other studies, in the grammar schools, with a collegiate course in the Free Academy, and schools for girls, in which select branches are taught which had hitherto been reserved for the higher class of institutes for young ladies. The system had been developed into a noble educational scheme, but it had changed its channel, and the stream flowed over a new bed, while it left a rapidly augmenting number of the poor stranded on the further shore, or drifting down to be lost in the eddies of ignorance and vice.

As the outgrowth of circumstances which could not fail to arrest the attention of the civilian and the reformer, a new order of schools grew up, inspired by the same motives and covering substantially the same ground as that so nobly occupied by the founder of the Lancasterian system. They added, however, a more liberal supply of material aid, together with an industrial organization and scheme, which proved of eminent advantage.