so often be ridden by the 'old' school "man of the sea," who parades his own conceit and stupidity before a crowd of admiring rural schoolma'ams, all this affords an ample target for the sharp-shooters, journalistic and pe lagogic, who, from their high olympic stools, fly the arrows of their abstract theories against all growing things in the republic. But this is only saying of the normal school, and its group of associated agencies, what can be said of every American institution yet in the gristle, of America itself. The thing to be done, the creation of a national professional class of men and women competent to handle the American common school in all its grades, according to the best modern methods, in the most compact, effective, and economical way, is one of the essentials of our new national life. The methods of doing this, so far, have been largely experimental, always improving; and are now, on the whole, in a far more hopeful state than ever, for an intelligent judgment and judicious reformation.

For one thing the American people so far have shown themselves competent,-to find out when a good thing is trying to get itself rooted in the national constitution, and honestly working to do a valuable service in the best way. It is to this stubborn determination to give fair play to a good thing, far more than to any very general appreciation of our new methods of education, that we ascribe the admirable spirit in which the assault of the enemies of the normal school has been repelled during the past year. When the critical conflict came off in the Legislature of Massachusetts, in 1840, in which the board of education, Horace Mann, and the normal school, were saved to America, it could be said that the victory was won by a few men. But it is a notable fact that, last winter, when the governor of

New York led the forlorn hope of ignorance and bigotry to a final charge on the free higher education and normal schools of that commonwealth; and the Senate of Massachusetts set itself to block the wheels of this department of the public-school system; there was hardly a speech by legislator or schoolmaster which found its way into the public press. The common sense and right-minded will of the people of New York and New England opened before this eager phalanx of assailants like the vast realm of the Adirondack wilderness to a band of amateur explorers, into which the deeper they penetrate the more hopelessly they are lost. The faintest show of statistics and argument overwhelmed this band of normal-school critics, and exposed the deplorable ignorance, the petty jealousy, or the un-American, ecclesiastical animus of the movement. With due allowance for the popular panic that always accompanies a season of "hard times" in the country, the appropriations, State and local, for popular education have been remarkably liberal during the past year. And never was the determination of the Northern American people to insist on the superior training of teachers so unmistakably put, as during the past year of industrial anxiety and political peril in every State from Maine to Oregon.

It is now settled that the common-school system at present on the ground is to be the basis of the permanent educational establishment of the American people. All its modifications will be in the line of superior efficiency, consolidation, economy of money and power. The attempt of a ring of Roman Catholic bishops to upset the American common school will have an outcome that may well be pondered by every priesthood which dreams that the United States of America is to be governed by any religious or irreligious sect, or clerical or anti-clerical class.

The howl of the stupid economy that would save money this year by turning out a generation of ignorant and vicious young people next year, is being laughed out of doors, and if laughing will not suffice, will be put down in a more summary way at the polls. The last assault on the higher education by the American imitators of a superior European class, led by a few secular politicians, and college presidents with continental university aspirations, has not disturbed the regular ongoing of a single high school in New England.

The final demonstration against a cultivated teachingclass by the army of "nice young women" and their friends and instructors, who instinctively feel that the normal school is death to their aspirations, will share the same fate. The United States Commissioner of Education expresses the opinion that this last wave of opposition to the common school that has just swept across the continent has made no appreciable mark; it is the receding swash of a storm that "blew over" a quarter of a century ago.

But this confidence in the stability of our American system of public instruction must not be confounded with the blind, obstinate defence of every educational method forced upon us by the temporary necessities of a growing country. There are reasons, even, for the senseless onslaught, as well as the cultivated criticism upon our present ways of developing a profession of public instruction. It has long been apparent to the influential friends of the public-school system, that its different departments are too widely extended; too often working at cross-purposes; superficial and wasteful in the application of power, no less than the use of money. Nobody is to be specially censured that it is so. Indeed, the present condition of normal education is greatly

due to the same people who now hold it up to the ridicule of the tax-paying community. Our normal and training-school has, risen to its present state in the face of the incredulity or the active opposition of influential classes. Often the school authorities and the leading teachers of the public schools, to say nothing of college presidents and professors, have been its open or secret foes. Its best work is baffled and distracted by the narrow prejudice and official tyranny of men in the superior positions of grammar and high-school masters, who know so well how to confuse and subjugate the young woman-graduate who is placed under their supervision. The local school committee has the power, which it often uses, to deprive the young, poorly-paid girls who teach in the country school-houses, of the benefit of the institute and convention that is their only opportunity for an outlook beyond the narrow district horizon. It is not wonderful that a yearly wrangle in the Legislature over the moderate appropriation for the State normal school, should disgust, and finally dislodge, many of our wisest and most effective teachers from positions so uncertain and thankless. As a natural result of coming up in the face of such a dust-storm, our system for training teachers is, doubtless, open to serious objections, which may be frankly confessed by their friends without impeachment of the cause they have so deeply at heart.

The best of our State normal schools are suffering from their loose and uncritical demands for preparatory culture. They are clogged with young women of every stage of academical unfitness; indeed, a considerable number of their students could not obtain admission to a superior high school. Even greater is the disability of many of these students in that social training and contact with educated people which is so essential to

the successful teacher. This primary weakness is rarely made up even by that excellent academic training of the brief two years' course, and is almost a complete disqualification for a normal training in the philosophy and methods of instruction. It is almost impossible that a green country maiden, with a poor grammarschool outfit, even after a year's severe application, should be competent to appreciate the profound system of normal methods so admirably elaborated in schools like Westfield, Mass., and Oswego, N. Y. Thus, in spite of the admirable teaching in several of these institutions, too large a proportion of the graduates fail to grasp the matter by the handle, and go out either to disgrace their alma mater by their superficiality and conceit, or to fall into a heap of confusion on the first smart contact with a real school. In the State schools of New York this peril has been somewhat guarded by a vigorous use of the practice-school attached to the institution; but in New England this feature has never been greatly in favor; and the full consequences of imperfect preparation have been visited on the heads of the devoted managers of these excellent schools. If this be true of the older and most successful State normal schools of the East, how much more is it true of the great number of public and private seminaries, all over the land, which have sewed a great normal tag npon a second-rate academy. Even these pretentious and superficial schools have, doubtless, put forth a reasonaable number of young people with better than average equipment for the school-room; but, while the children have been somewhat the gainers, the cause of genuine normal education has suffered prodigiously from the large professions and scanty performances of this class of seminaries.