United States. The educational system of Honolulu is based on New
England models. Robert College, near Constantinople, has spread the
principles of Christian democracy in Church and State, as they are held
by New Englanders, throughout Bulgaria and the Balkan states, and given
ideals to the Young Turkey party in the land where the Sultan is
dominant. The Huguenot Seminary in South Africa was distinctly modelled
after Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and its first teaching staff was made up of
New England women educated at Mt. Holyoke. Wherever American Protestant
missionaries have gone and established schools and colleges in Asia,
Africa, or Europe, almost invariably the master spirits, the men and
women who have given character to, and established the ideals of, the
institutions, have been graduates of the New England colleges and
academies, even if not New-England-born.
Subtract from the history of education in the United States, during the
latter half of the century just closing, the influence of four men,
Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Charles William Eliot, and William Torrey
Harris, and you take from it the best that it stands for to-day. All of
these men were born in New England. All were reformers. All showed great
administrative ability. All lived to see their radical views find
general acceptance. Horace Mann did his greatest work in remodelling the
public-school system of Massachusetts. Barnard did a similar work in
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, but his greatest service to
the cause of education was his masterly editing of the _American Journal
of Education_, from 1855 to 1881. Eliot has transformed the curriculum
of Harvard, the oldest university of the North, has resolutely contended
for the largest measure of election by the student in his selection of
studies, his personal conduct, and his personal attitude toward God, and
he has made “Veritas” in very truth the appropriate motto of the
leading American institution of learning. Harris, as an interpreter of
the philosophy of education, both in his many writings and more numerous
addresses, has lifted the popular conception of the profession of
teaching to a loftier and more rational plane, while his control of the
United States Bureau of Education since 1889 has given it a standing
abroad, and a measure of utility at home, which it is gratifying to
contemplate.
Few towns in New England possess more charm, whether of nature or
society, than the towns in which her long-established institutions of
learning have taken root, flourished, and dominated the life of the
community. New Haven, Cambridge, and Providence are all cities now with
a heterogeneous population and large manufacturing interests, and they
each contain thousands of inhabitants to whom Harvard, Yale, and Brown
are of as little practical benefit or concern as if they were situated
in remote Hawaii or Porto Rico. Nevertheless, the chief glory of each of
these large towns is its institution of learning, and to each there come
added beauty of life and elevation of tone because of the presence
within its borders of so many thirsty and hungry students and highly
educated and apt instructors. It would be idle, however, to claim, for
instance, that Cambridge to-day is quite as unique and charming in its
simplicity and purity of life, or quite as classic in its atmosphere, as
it was in the days when the town was a village, when the university was
a college, and when thought and manners were as ideal as James Russell
Lowell in his essay, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson in his latest book, _Cheerful Yesterdays_, picture them.
To study the American college town at its best, unsullied by the grime
of industrialism and the temptations and conventionalities of city life,
one must go to hill-towns like Amherst and Williamstown, Massachusetts,
or Hanover, New Hampshire. But even there, standards of living and
conduct among students and instructors have been changed and influenced
by the habits and ideals of the universities and the cities. Hence, to
see the American college town in all its pristine simplicity and beauty,
one now has to go to the new New England, and visit such institutions as
Oberlin, Beloit, Knox, Iowa, and Colorado colleges, concerning which,
and others of their type, Mr. Bryce writes:
“They get hold of a multitude of poor men who might never resort to
a distant place for education. They set learning in a visible form,
plain indeed and humble, but dignified even in her humility, before
the eyes of a rustic people, in whom the love of knowledge,
naturally strong, might never break from the bud into the flower,
but for the care of some zealous gardener. They give the chance of
rising in some intellectual walk of life to many a strong and
earnest nature who might otherwise have remained an artisan or
storekeeper, and perhaps failed in those avocations.”[62]
New England has a railroad mileage greater in proportion to its
population and area than any section of the United States. Indeed, it is
greater than that of any European country. In 1895, there were 11.77
miles of railroad for each one hundred square miles of territory, and
14.11 miles for each ten thousand inhabitants, the proportion in
Massachusetts rising to 26.35 miles for each one hundred square miles.
The same year, the number of employés engaged in railway traffic in New
England was 60,593. On January 1, 1840, New England had only 426 miles
of railway. January 1, 1895, it had 7,398 miles of road, which reported
gross earnings of $82,845,401, and 116,069,178 passengers transported
during the previous year.
The significance of these facts is apparent to the casual traveller
through New England as well as to the economist. Nerves of steel and
iron have bound urban and rural populations together, made the cities
and towns accessible to the inland trader, farmer, and producer, and the
country districts accessible to the wares of the merchant and
manufacturer, and to the lover of nature. Suburban residence for the
urban toiler has been made possible and cheap, while New England, as a
whole, has been transformed from an agricultural and seafaring section
to one with great and most varied manufacturing interests. Boston has
come to be next to the largest centre for exports in the country, and
the commercial and industrial as well as the intellectual capital of New
England.
From the standpoint of æsthetics, the railroad station in the average
New England town is a monstrosity, although in all fairness it should
be said that within a decade there has been a notable improvement in
this respect. But from the standpoint of economics and social science,
the railway station is subordinate only to the church and the school in
its service to society; and the degree of civilization in any community
may be accurately computed by the volume and variety of the traffic done
with its station agents. If one is desirous of studying the New England
town, let him frequent the platforms of the railroad station and the
freight-house, ascertain how large a proportion of its inhabitants leave
town daily to do business in the adjacent city, how many travel even
farther in pursuit of pleasure or on business, how many depart on
outings that imply thrift and a desire for recreation and rest. Let him
study the bulk of the raw material as it comes from the wool-markets of
Europe and America, from the cotton fields of the South, and from the
mines of Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and then inspect it as it
goes forth again, converted into manifold forms of useful tools,
machinery, fabrics, etc., and he will not lack for data respecting the
status of the community. If he finds that pianos, organs, books,
pictures, the latest devices of sanitary science, bicycles, etc., are
arriving, he may justly infer that the inhabitants are in touch with the
outer world and eager to take advantage of the latest discoveries of men
of science. Nor is it imprudent to assert that such a study made in the
average New England town will indicate economic wants, and their
satisfaction, such as no communities elsewhere can display.
Compared with other sections of the country, New England has railroads
which are better supervised by the States, more honestly constructed,
capitalized and administered, and more responsive to public needs.
Concentration of power and responsibility in the hands of the few goes
on apace in New England, as well as elsewhere, so that now there are
only four railway corporations of much importance in New England. But,
through such governmental agents as the Massachusetts Board of Railroad
Commissioners (organized in 1869, and the model for similar bodies
elsewhere in the nation), the people still retain the whip-hand, still
protect the rights of individuals, communities, and investors, and bring
about those reductions in fare and freight charges, and those
improvements in service, which public welfare and safety demand.
No attempt--however brief or superficial--to describe the life of the
New England town of the last decade of the nineteenth century,
especially in the States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island, could justifiably fail to note the transformation--economic,
physical, and social--which the bicycle and trolley electric railroad
have wrought in the life of the towns of those States.
New England capitalists and New England inventors were the first to put
on the market safety bicycles that were well constructed, adapted for
daily use or pleasure, and reasonably cheap, and New England still
retains the lead in the domestic and export trade in bicycles.
Naturally, then, New England people were the first to purchase the
product of their own factories. Space does not suffice to indicate here
how general now is the use of the bicycle even in the remotest hamlets,
and how it has changed modes of living. Farmers’ boys and girls among
the lakes and hills of Maine and Vermont, fishermen’s children on the
sand-dunes of Cape Cod, run their errands, visit their neighbors, and
get their daily sport with the bicycle. Artisans and professional men
in all the towns and cities go to and from their shops, offices, and
homes on steeds that require no fodder, and while doing it gain physical
exercise and mental exhilaration that transportation in the old ways
never furnished. Horses still are in demand for sport and draught work,
and the few who love horses continue to breed and own them. But for the
multitude a far cheaper and more tractable kind of steed has come, one
which rivals the locomotive as well as the horse and forces
steam-railway managers to face serious problems, mechanical and fiscal.
As to the electric street railway, perhaps a few facts relative to
Massachusetts may indicate a state of affairs that to some extent is
typical now of the section, and will become more so as population in New
Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont drifts townward.
From 1860 to 1889, the number of street-railway companies in
Massachusetts increased only from twenty to forty-six, and the mileage
from eighty-eight to 574, the motor force of course being horse-power.
From 1889 to 1897, the number of companies increased from forty-six to
ninety-three, and the mileage from 547 to 1413, the motor power being
almost exclusively electric. During the same period, the number of
passengers carried on the ten main lines increased from 148,189,403 in
1889, to 308,684,224 in 1897. The total capital invested in these street
railways now amounts to $63,112,800, and, in 1897, earned 7·78 per cent.
on the average.
So much for statistics which are impressive in themselves. But if one
would appreciate the magnitude of this traffic, and the radical
transformation which the new power and improved service have wrought in
the life of the people who patronize these railroads, he must do more
than compare statistics. He must note the result of making the residence
in the suburb and the workshop in the city accessible to a degree that
the steam railway cannot expect to duplicate, of giving city dwellers
opportunities to journey seaward and hillward at a trifling expense, of
providing residents of the villages with inexpensive transportation to
the towns and residents of the towns with transportation to the cities,
of cultivating the knowledge of and love for open-air life and nature
among city dwellers and of enlarging the social horizon and area of
observation of the villager, of giving a poor man a vehicle that
transports him with a speed and a sense of pleasure that vies with that
of the high-priced trotter of the wealthy horseman, of giving to society
a centripetal force that tends to take city workers countryward at a
time when other social forces, centrifugal in their tendency, are
drawing him cityward.
Naught would occasion more bewilderment to the ancient residents of
Marblehead, Hingham, or Plymouth, could they return to their former
places of abode, than the “Broomstick Trains” which Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s fancy pictured thus:
“On every stick there’s a witch astride,--
The string you see to her leg is tied.
She will do a mischief if she can,
But the string is held by a careful man,
And whenever the evil-minded witch
Would cut some caper, he gives a twitch.
As for the hag, you can’t see her,
But hark! you can hear her black cat’s purr,
And now and then, as a car goes by,
You may catch a gleam from her wicked eye.”
These trains whirl through the crooked streets with a mysterious,
awe-compelling power, that would suggest witchery were it not for the
clang of their alarm bells, and the knowledge that fares must be paid.
They disturb the quiet and solemnity of many an ancient village, and
have brought knowledge of evil as well as of good to many a youth. What
railways and steamship lines have done in bringing peoples of all climes
and continents nearer together, and thus at once widened men’s area of
knowledge and sympathy, and contracted the physical area of the earth,
this the electrically propelled motor is doing on a smaller scale for
the people of the towns of the ancient commonwealths of New England.
In ante-bellum days, New England and the South were, perhaps, most
unlike in their attitude toward manufacturing, and the difference was
one that meant far more than a mere incident of difference of climate or
a difference of opinion as to sectional or federal fiscal policy. The
art of manufacturing, as New Englanders had practised it for generations
before what is now known as the “factory system” developed, had been
based on a universal recognition of the nobility of labor, the necessity
for personal initiative, and the duty of thrift. Toil was considered
honorable for men and women alike. Every hillside stream was set at
work turning the wheels of countless mills. Yankee ingenuity was given
free play in the invention of appliances, and Yankee initiative saw to
it that after the raw material was converted into the finished product,
markets were found in the newer settlements of the Interior and West, or
in Europe and Asia. Many a farmer was a manufacturer as well. Home
industries flourished, and no month in the year was too inclement for
toil and its reward.
With the application of steam power to the transportation of freight and
passengers, with the invention of the spinning-jenny and the perfecting
of the cotton loom and the development of the “factory system” of
specialized and divided labor, New England, quick to perceive wherein
her future prosperity lay, at once leaped forward to seize the
opportunity, and the relative superiority thus early gained she has not
lost, even though other sections more favorably situated as to
accessible supplies of fuel and raw materials have, in the meantime,
awakened and developed.
Whether judged by the legislation governing their operation, their
structural adaptability to the work to be done, their equipment of
machinery, the variety and quality of their product, or the intelligence
and earning capacity of their operatives, the New England factories can
safely challenge comparison with those of any in the world, and the
typical factory towns of New England, whether along her largest rivers,
such as Lowell and Hartford, or at tide-water, as Fall River and
Bridgeport, or nestled among the hills, as North Adams or St. Johnsbury,
are the frequent subject of study by the deputed agents of European
governments or manufacturers, anxious to ascertain what it is that makes
the American manufacturer so dangerous a competitor in the markets of
Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Few more interesting movements in the history of man’s upward struggle
have been chronicled than the successive waves of immigration which have
swept into the factories of towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, and
Manchester, New Hampshire. First came from the hill towns and farms the
daughters of the original English, Irish, and Scotch settlers--women
like Lucy Larcom,--then the Irish, specially imported from Ireland, and
then the French from Canada. The Irish came when the original stock
became, in its own estimation, too select for daily toil in the
factory. The French came at an opportune time for the employers, when
the Irish were also stirred by loftier ambitions. And it is already
apparent that, whereas the French came, at first, only to win money to
take back to Canada, now they are settling down to become citizens as
well as residents, aspiring to higher and other realms of activity--in
short, getting ready to give way in turn to some other nationality. Of
course, nothing just stated should be interpreted to imply that the
ideals of New England respecting the honorable nature of toil have
changed, or that her factory operatives have ceased to be men of all
races including the English. She has, however, witnessed or rather been
the scene of a remarkable process of assimilation and transformation of
races such as none of the manufacturing towns of England have seen.
Thus far, consideration has been given to those factors in the life of
the community which it may truthfully be said are to be found in a large
majority of the towns and villages of New England. It would be
necessary, for a complete study of the New England town at its best, to
include other factors, such as the savings-bank, the local lodges of
the fraternal, secret orders, the co-operative bank--known in the Middle
States as the building loan association,--the daily or weekly local
newspaper, and the gossip and wisdom retailed by the habitués of the
“village store,” which, in many of the smaller towns, serves as the
clearing-house of ideas, local and national. Nor could any thorough
study of the New England town as an institution fail to note at least
the beneficent effect which the exclusion of shops where intoxicating
liquors are retailed has had upon all of the States, thanks to that
measure of prohibition which has been made possible through statutory or
legislative enactment. So that, in the towns of the agricultural
districts of New England, the legalized dram-shop is unknown, as are all
the attendant moral and economic evils that follow in its train when the
traffic is tolerated. Nor is the possibility of excluding the saloon
from larger towns--manufacturing and residential--to be gainsaid in view
of the record established by such cities as Cambridge, Somerville,
Chelsea, Brookline, and Newton, Massachusetts. In fact, Cambridge, with
its more than eighty thousand inhabitants, for nearly twelve years now
has enforced local prohibition in a way to make its method of doing so
a model for the country; the secret of the method by which it secures an
annual “No-license vote” and a non-partisan administration of all city
affairs being, in short, the union of temperance men of all degrees of
abstinence, Jews and Christians of all sects, and citizens of all
national parties on the simple platform--“No saloons, and no tests for
local officials other than fitness, and soundness on questions of local
policy.”
But there is one factor in the life of very many of the New England
towns to-day that cannot be passed by without some allusion. It is the
town or city library. In many instances the gift of some private donor,
who was either born in the town, and making a home and fortune elsewhere
desired to testify that he was not unmindful of ancestral environment
and of youthful privileges, or else accumulated a fortune in the town
and desired both to perpetuate his memory and to render a public
service, the library building usually stands as a token of that marked
interest in public education and public welfare which Americans of
wealth reveal by gifts, generous to a degree unknown elsewhere in
Christendom, competent European judges being witnesses. Appleton’s
_Annual Encyclopedia_ records a total of $27,000,000 given to religious,
educational, and philanthropic institutions in the United States, in
sums of $5000 or more, by individuals, as donations or bequests during
the year 1896. In this list are recorded gifts, amounting to $195,000,
to establish or to endow town libraries in New England.
Sometimes the major portion of the contents of the library building is
also the gift of the generous donor of the edifice, but, usually, the
town assumes responsibility for the equipment and maintenance of the
library, deriving the necessary income from appropriations voted by the
citizens in town-meetings or by aldermen and councilmen, members of the
local legislature, and assessed and collected _pro rata_ according to
the valuation of property, just as all other town or city taxes are
collected. But, whether the gift of some private individual or the
creation and property of the town, the fact remains that the handsomest
public buildings in New England to-day are the public-library buildings,
and in no department of civic life are the New England States and towns
so far in advance of those of other sections of the country as in their
generous annual appropriations for the maintenance of this form of
individual and civic betterment. New Hampshire is to be credited with
the first law permitting towns to establish and to maintain libraries by
general taxation. This she did in 1849. Massachusetts followed in 1854,
Vermont in 1865, Connecticut in 1881. Boston, however, deserves credit
for being the pioneer in public taxation for a municipal library, and to
the Hon. Josiah Quincy, grandfather of its present mayor, who, in 1847,
proposed to the City Council that they request the Legislature for
authority to lay a tax to establish a free library, belongs the honor of
having founded in America a form of municipal and town activity, than
which, as Stanley Jevons says, in his book _Methods of Social Reform_,
“there is probably no mode of expending public money which gives a more
extraordinary and immediate return in utility and enjoyment.”
Already, library administrators and far-sighted educators and publicists
foresee a time when it will be as compulsory for towns to establish and
support free public libraries as it now is compulsory for them to
establish and support free public schools. Massachusetts, perhaps,
approaches nearer that ideal now than any other State, only ten of its
353 cities and towns being without public libraries.