been at once ratified by the new republic. At a later period the movement by the legislature of Maryland for including the original 13 States in this distribution had excited great attention. Of course such a thought as was expressed in 1849 in the resolution of the committee of which Dr. Barnard was chairman for a memorial to Congress in behalf of a "bureau of the home department" for the distribution of statistical information, and in the communication presented in 1851 by Dr. A. A. Livermore, of Cincinnati, and referred to a committee consisting of Judge Bellamy Storer and Rufus King, of that city, and Horace Mann, was not the private property of any one man, however eminent. Dr. Barnard simply looked farther or was more optimistic than his associates in presenting this topic as practically the first in importance for the consideration of the first Philadelphia convention. It is to be observed that to no man in that body of remarkable men was assigned the chairmanship of so many committees dealing with every phase of popular education now represented by the national bureau.

At the last meeting of the American Association, in 1855, the standing committee reported that they had taken into consideration the entire plan of Dr. Barnard, but "from want of funds had been able to take no definite action in regard to the matter." This included the appointment of a general agent and the publication of a national journal of education, for which the association was "not authorized or prepared to assume the responsibility." Dr. Barnard then proposed to undertake the publication of such a journal, the first number to consist of the proceedings of that body. His proposition was assented to, with the distinct understanding that the association should in no way be responsible for the conduct of the journal or pecuniarily liable. It is evident that the association, apart from its very small entrance fee of membership, had little control of funds, there being no report of the collection of the proposed $5,000 for offering premiums for educational authorship. It was evidently vain to suppose that Congress, on the eve of a war for the preservation of the Union itself, could be persuaded even to look at a proposition to make commonschool education a national interest. Thus, while the Association for the Advancement of Education was willing to give a perfunctory indorsement to a scheme so vast and comprehensive as that of Dr. Barnard, the plan itself died in the hands of the standing committee to which it was referred. The notion of any union between States so wedded to their own convictions of popular education as those of the old North and new West; the vain hope of bringing the positive and aggressive representatives of the great religious bodies into any hearty approval of anything above the common district elementary school; the absolute impossibility of moving a single Southern State to unite with Northern educators in behalf of an educational system so closely identified with the entire industrial, civic, and social status of that section; these and other reasons were all sufficient to dissuade that association from any serious attempt to give bodily shape to the elaborate plan of Dr. Barnard. After a year's waiting on his colleagues, he declares:

In the absence of any funds belonging to the association and of any pledge of pecuniary cooperation on the part of individuals the committee have not taken any steps to establish a central agency for the advancement of the objects for which the association was instituted, or felt authorized to provide for any publication beyond the proceedings of its last annual meeting. Under these circumstances the undersigned has undertaken, on his own responsibility, to carry out the original plan submitted by him so far as relates to the publication both of the journal and the library, relying on the annual subscriptions of individuals in different States, and interested in different allotments of the great field, who desire to be posted up in the current intelligence and discussion of schools and education, to meet the current expenses of the former.a

ED 1902-57

a Barnard's Journal, Vol. I, pp. 1-2.

In fact, during the remaining years preceding the war the subject of a national bureau of education rarely appears in the proceedings of the National Teachers' Association, by which it was finally forced on the attention of Congress in 1866. A few speeches and resolutions in 1858, 1859, and 1860 are all that appear in the document relating to the establishment of the office of commissioner of education read before the National Educational Association in 1901, by the present U. S. Commissioner of Education. During that period Dr. Barnard seems to have made no special point of the subject. In fact, during the existence of the American Association, he was engrossed in the duties of his second State superintendency in Connecticut from 1851 to 1855, then again broken down by the habit of his life of repeated prostrations of health. But during these four years he had done invaluable service to the State in the establishment of the first State normal school, in drawing up a revised code of school laws, and especially in publishing "A History of the legislation of Connecticut respecting common schools up to 1838." After a visit to Europe, and the establishment of the American Journal of Education, he was again enlisted in public administration by a call in 1857 to the chancellorship of the university and agency of the board of regents of the normal-school fund of the State of Wisconsin, an invitation which he accepted in 1859 and held until 1861. Immediately at the close of the war, we find him again engaged in administrative duties, in 1866, as president of St. John's College in Maryland, from which he was called March 14, 1867, to the position of first Commissioner of Education in the newly established Department of Education, a position held for three years until March 15, 1870.

The subject of a national bureau of education appears during the progress of the civil war and immediately on its close in connection with the proceedings of the National Teachers' Association. It is not remarkable that the movement at that time should have been largely in the hands of the leading educators of the Northwest. Indeed, the first uprising of common-school interest at the close of the war was in the State of New York, the five original Western States, and the few States beyond the Mississippi, including Missouri. A large proportion of the most distinguished common-school and university men and women of that section had been called from the New England and the Middle States. Before the outbreak of hostilities Horace Mann had been called to his final work at Antioch College, Ohio, Henry Barnard to Wisconsin, Chancellor Tappan to Michigan, Dr. W. G. Eliot and Dr. Harris to Missouri, while the colleges and normal schools of the East were sending forth large numbers of workers in every department of western education. At the meeting of the National Association of Superintendents in Washington in 1866 Dr. E. E. White, then president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Indiana, delivered an address advocating the establishment of a national bureau of education, and he was appointed chairman of a committee of five to present the subject to Congress. The bill was carried through the House of Representatives largely by the influence of James A. Garfield, afterwards President of the United States. But it was a fit recognition, not only of the great general services rendered to education by • Dr. Barnard in the past in all sections of the country, but also of his early conception of what afterwards became, first the "Department," and then the "Bureau" of Education, that he should be selected by President Andrew Johnson as the first occupant of the office of United States Commissioner.

The new bureau simply appeared in the statutes as a "department" for "the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several States and Territories, and of diffusing such information * ** as shall aid the people of the United States in the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems, and otherwise promote the cause of education throughout the country." The appropriation for the support of the commissioner and three assistants, at salaries of $4,000, $2,000, $1,800, and $1,600, amounted in all

to $9,400. The work of publication under Dr. Barnard included only an annual report with circulars, containing the investigations and recommendations of the commissioner. The commissioner of public buildings was authorized to find office room for this, then the smallest, "department" connected with the National Gov- ' ernment.

No special charge of indifference to education in the abstract or personal narrowness need be imputed to Congress in thus fixing these limits. It would have been impossible then, as now, to have carried through either House of Congress a bill to charter even a bureau with four officials, and an annual income of less than $10,000, with any additional authority over education, or even with such as constitutionally inhered in the law-making power.

The first obstacle appeared in the attempt to do what was ordered in the statute and in a subsequent joint resolution, namely, to report accurately concerning the use made by the States of the school land grants of Congress, and to give a reliable account of the condition of education in the District of Columbia.

In the face of existing embarrassments it was evident that the "one thing needful” to be done at the beginning was to set the educational pitch of the little "department" after a fashion that would of itself challenge the attention of the school public at home and abroad, and especially awaken such an interest among the friends of the common school as would make it dangerous even to meddle with, and impossible to repeal, the statute establishing it.

There was one man in the United States who was peculiarly adapted to this grand work of public inspiration in a decisive and inviting way. That man, as has been stated, was the educator who, in a career of thirty years, had achieved a national and international reputation by the habit of fashioning everything connected with education into a grand and attractive shape. The greatest praise that could be given to the first U. S. Commissioner of Education was that he so magnified what could easily have been considered the most insignificant portion of the National Government in the view of educators at home and abroad as to make possible the work of his successors. This work was most effectually done by Dr. Barnard in his first report to Congress, covering the year 1867-68, a document of 856 closely printed pages.

The attempt to comply with the requirement to give an account of the disposition of the educational land grants made by Congress only revealed the fact of the impossibility of any immediate success. It was like a call to survey a highway through a wilderness, so dense that even the practiced woodsman would be hopelessly confused in groping after the tracks "blazed" by the first explorers. Some information concerning the original grants, and a tolerably correct account of the action of a portion of the States in accepting the latest of these grants (for agricultural and mechanical colleges in 1862), was all that could be reasonably expected at that time.

The Commissioner presented to Congress on the same date, viz, May 30, 1868, a special report on educational affairs in the District of Columbia, in compliance with a joint resolution dated March 29, 1867. In gathering data for this report he had called Mr. Franklin Hough, of New York, one of the best statistical experts of the time, to take a new census of the shifting crowd that the civil-war period had drifted into the capital city of the nation. Mr. Goodwin was invited to work out the most original and, perhaps, then the most important subject, the history of the schooling of the free colored people in the District of Columbia and of the new schools being established in the former slave States for the negroes.

In an extended supplementary report, prepared after Dr. Barnard's connection with the Bureau of Education ceased, this work was further carried out, in a volume concerning agricultural and technical education abroad. The important documents composing this report, which opened new prospects to the educational public

of the period, were printed as a separate volume of Dr. Barnard's American, now rechristened National, Journal of Education, at the author's expense, under a pledge that their publication should not involve the Government in additional expense.

The original report, in its attempt to cover the ground laid out by the statute, presented a great variety of interesting and valuable information, which even now makes this volume a standard work of historical importance. In its opening 25 pages the commissioner outlines his policy for the new bureau. Then follows a collection of circulars and documents issued by the commissioner, containing the history of the legislation establishing the Bureau of Education; farther on come several pages of information less known forty years ago than now, concerning the interest in public education by the fathers of the Republic. The original speech of the schoolmaster President, James A. Garfield, which carried the bill through the House of Representatives, finds a conspicuous place in this connection. All that could then be ascertained concerning the disposition of the educational land grants made by Congress was published; one new State, Minnesota, being selected as an object lesson of the most successful administration of this trust. Fifty pages are filled with a record of the constitutional provisions of the several States of the Union concerning public education, and nearly 200 pages with information concerning national and State legislation respecting colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts; this section concluding with an account of certain of the institutions which became beneficiaries of the agricultural college land grant. Under the head "The State and Education" is republished the admirable address of Bishop George W. Doane, of New Jersey, to the people of that State in 1838, on the importance of universal education, supported by numerous quotations from eminent civic and educational authorities at home and abroad on the same topic. Then follows an extended republication of the facts and statistics of education in foreign countries, a subject at that time recently brought before the educational public of the country from observations by Stowe, Mann, Bache, Barnard, and many others. School architecture, a matter of first importance, especially to the new Western and Southern States, is treated with illustrative plans and cuts. A valuable essay on the normal school question, State and city, fills 200 additional pages of this crowded public document. The report is fitly closed by numerous quotations from the highest authorities in answer to the question, "What is education?"

As we become acquainted with the actual status of American educational affairs in the decade from 1860 to 1870, especially the comparatively demoralized condition of the common school in the Northern States from the strain of the civil war; its complication with partisan politics, sectarian religion, and the transformation of social conditions in the new West; the fact that no science of educational statistics then existed outside the theories of a few superior educators; that the sixteen Southern States were standing amid the ruins of all that had existed among them under the name of educational foundations; the violence of political parties, which virtually prolonged the war for ten years after the surrender of Lee at Appomattox; the meager income of the little department, working in narrow quarters and really not known at all to the majority of Congressmen -we can somewhat apprehend, but never quite understand, the obstacles to doing anything that beset the first Commissioner of Education. There was simply nothing to be done save to give the new Department of Education a place and a record as the one central agency of education endowed by the National Government.

Happily, a man who by the experience of a generation of illustrious labors was eminently qualified to do this work, at whatever sacrifice to himself, sat in the lonely chair of the U. S. Commissioner of Education. His work is evident from the mass of valuable material filling the two stout volumes sent forth during the three years of his occupancy.

When we examine these documents for their quality we find it difficult to decide what better message could have been set before the educational public of the country than the matter already described. There was the demonstration of the educational capabilities of the negro race from actual experience in the District of Columbia to encourage the education, in the common schools, of this "nation within a nation,” now ten millions strong, but then with its foot just lifted up toward the threshold of republican civilization. The action of Congress in 1862 in making a new gift of public lands for the founding of agricultural and mechanical colleges for both races demanded such a publication of the European and home efforts in this radical new departure in the schooling of American youth as here appeared. The reluctance of great States and old cities toward making due provision for the training of their teachers was here confronted with a statement of the results of normal-school work not to be gainsaid. The thousands of school buildings with their fit furnishing waiting to be erected all over the land found here a partial republication of Dr. Barnard's original treatise on school architecture. The great South, on the brink of a new educational experiment, found ample encouragement in the thoroughgoing indorsement of the common-school system by the representative of the National Government, with additional description of the reformed methods of study, discipline, and school administration. That portion of the religious public which persisted in forcing the sharp distinction between "Christian" and "secular" schools was here shown that the American common school of the reformed type, perhaps better than any existing agency, was engaged in the training of young America into the genuine Christian ideals of character set forth nineteen centuries ago by the great Teacher of mankind in Palestine.

In short, it is not easy to say what could have been better done during the first three years of what finally became the National Bureau of Education within its original environments to hold up before the American people the grand ideals of universal education than to publish to a larger audience, under the authority of the National Government, much of the valuable information that hitherto had only been accessible to the limited number of the readers of the American Journal of Education. There are times in the development of the higher life of a people, as of a man, when it seems that a friendly Providence sets narrow and insurmountable bounds and limits to human effort, which even discourage the noblest worker for better things; but, meanwhile, the sons and daughters of reform are held fast to some "one thing needful" to be done as a basis of all future progress. Such was the task of Dr. Henry Barnard as first United States Commissioner of Education.

III.-ESTABLISHMENT OF THE OFFICE OF THE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION OF THE UNITED STATES, AND HENRY BARNARD'S RELATION TO IT.a

BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS.

As members of the National Council of Education, we are assembled this evening to pay our respects to the memory of Dr. Henry Barnard. By common consent Dr. Barnard ranks as the second of the two great educational heroes which America has furnished. Other members of the council have prepared papers on his work as a critic of education, on his influence in the establishment of normal schools in the country, on his influence upon the schools in the Western States, and, finally, on his home life and his influence upon education in Rhode Island and Connecticut. To

a Reprinted from the Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1901.