school if there were one in their own city or district. Sec. 4. That section four of said act which reads as follows: "Sec. 4. It shall be the duty of the assessor of voters of every district, at the spring registration of voters, or as soon as possible thereafter, to make, in a substantial book provided by the county commissioners for that purpose, a careful and correct list of all children between the ages of eight and thirteen years within his district, giving the name, age and residence of each, and whether in charge of a parent, guardian or other person, together with such other information as may be deemed necessary, which enumeration shall be returned by the said assessor to the county commissioners of the county in which the enumeration is made, whose duty it will be to certify it to the secretary of the proper school district, who shall immediately furnish the principal or teacher of each school with a correct list of all children in his or her district who are subject to the provisions of this act. And the said assessors shall be paid a per diem compensation for their services, a sum equal to the compensation paid under existing laws for assessors of election, said services not to exceed ten days," be and the same is hereby amended to read as follows: Sec. 4. It shall be the duty of the assessors of voters of every district, when not notified and directed to the contrary by the school board, at the spring registration of voters, or as soon as possible thereafter, to make, in a substantial book provided by the county commissioners for that purpose, a careful and correct list of all children between the ages of six and twenty one years within his district, giving the full name, date of birth, age, sex, nationality, residence, sub-school district, name and address of parent or person in parental relation, and name and address of the employer of any child under sixteen years of age that is engaged in any regular employment or service; which enumeration, after approval by the secretary of the said school district, shall be returned by the said assessor to the county commissioners of the county in which the enumeration is made, whose duty it will be to forward a certified copy of the same to the secretary of the proper school district prior to July fifteenth of each year, who shall immediately furnish the principal or teacher of each school with a correct list of all children in his or her district who are subject to the provisions of this act, and shall furnish a summary of such statistics to the Superintendent of Public Instruction upon blanks provided by the State. And the said assessors shall be paid, out of the county funds, a per diem compensation for their services, a sum equal to the compensation paid under existing laws for assessors of election, said services not to exceed ten days: Provided, That prior to February first of any year, any board of directors or controllers of any school district may authorize such enumeration to be made by the attendance officers at the expense of the school district, and at such times as they may direct: Provided further, That the attendance officers, if there be any, or the secretary of the school board, shall have power to add to this register the names of children within the prescribed ages whose names do not appear thereon. Sec. 5. That section five of said act, which reads as follows: "Sec. 5. It shall be the duty of each teacher in the school district to report immediately to the secretary of the board of directors or controllers, and thereafter at the close of each school month, the names of all children on the list previously furnished by the secretary who were absent without satisfactory cause for five days during the month for which the report shall be made, when, if it shall appear that any parent, guardian or other person having control of any child or children shall have failed to comply with the provisions of this act, after due notification in writing as provided in section two, the secretary, or attendance officer if there be one, in the name of the school district, shall proceed against the offending party or parties in accordance with lav by complaint before any alderman or justice of the peace: Provided further, That if sufficient cause be shown for the neglect of the requirements of this act, the cost of said proceedings shall be paid out of the district funds upon a proper voucher approved by the board of directors or controllers," be and the same is hereby amended to read as follows; Sec. 5. It shall be the duty of each teacher in the school district to report at the end of each month to the attendance officer, or the secretary of the board of directors or controllers, the names of all children on the list previously furnished by said secretary who have been absent five days without lawful excuse; when if it shall appear that any parent, guardian or other person having control of any child or children shall have failed to comply with the provisions of this act, after due notification in writing as provided in section two, the secretary, or attendance officer if there be one, in the name of the school district, shall proceed against the offending party or parties in accordance with law, by complaint before an alderman or justice of the peace: Provided further, That if sufficient cause be shown for the neglect of the requirements of this act, the cost of said proceedings shall be paid out of the district funds upon a proper voucher approved by the board of directors or controllers. Approved July 12th, 1897. DISTRIBUTING THE STATE APPROPRIATION. AN ACT to provide a more just and equitable method of distributing the school appropriation to common schools, and specifying the duties of officers in connection therewith. Section 1. Be it enacted, etc., That on and after June first, Anno Domini one thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight, one-third of the money annually appropriated for common schools in this Commonwealth shall be distributed on the basis of the number of paid teachers regularly employed for the full annual term of the district, not including substitute teachers or teachers employed to fill vacancies which may occur during the school year for which the appropriation was made; the certificates of the number of teachers regularly employed to be made as hereinafter provided. Sec. 2. That one-third of the appropriation shall be distributed on the basis of the number of children of school age between the years of six and sixteen residing in the respective districts, the enumeration and certificates to be made as hereinafter provided. Sec. 3. That the remaining one-third of the appropriation shall be distributed on the basis of the number of taxables as returned by the last biennial assessment. Sec. 4. That on the first Monday of December, one thousand eight hundred and ninetyseven, and biennially thereafter, the president and secretary of each school board shall, under oath, certify to the county, city or borough superintendents of their respective counties, cities or boroughs, the number of teachers in their employ as contemplated in this act; and on the first Monday of January, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight, and biennially thereafter, the said county, city or borough superintendent shall, under oath, make return to the Superintendent of Public Instruction. on such blank as he shall prepare, a tabulated return by districts of the teachers of his county, city or borough; and any president or secretary of a school board or superintendent of a county, city or borough, who neglects or refuses to perform his duty within ten days of the time designated, shall be subject to a fine of not less than twenty-five nor more than one hundred dollars. Sec. 5. That it shall be the duty of the assessors of the several townships, wards and boroughs in the counties and cities of this Commonwealth, to make an enrollment at the assessment of the total number of children of school age, between the ages of six and sixteen years, in addition to the duties required of them under existing laws, and for the same compensation per diem now allowed by law. The blanks required for this enumeration and enrollment shall be prepared according to the form prepared by and under the direction of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, who shall cause the same to be forwarded to the county commissioners of the several counties for distribution to the assessors at the expense of the State. Sec. 6. The enumeration and enrollment herein provided for shall be made by the assessors at the same time they are required by law to make their regular assessments for county taxes, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven, and at the same time, and biennially thereafter, the official returns to be made to the county commissioners shall be filed by them in the office of the county commissioners, duly verified by oath or affirmation, on or before the fourth Saturday of December, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven, and biennially thereafter. The county commissioners to return a summary of the same to the Superintendent of Public Instruction on or before the last Saturday of January, next following. Sec. 7. Any assessor who shall refuse or neglect to make the enumeration, enrollment and official returns required by this act, shall pay a fine of not less than twentyfive or more than one hundred dollars, and shall be liable to removal from office upon complaint to the court of common pleas of the proper county, which complaint it shall be the duty of the county commissioners to make in the case of neglect or refusal of any assessor to comply with the provisions of this act. Sec. 8. The blanks for the use of the county commissioners in the preparation of their biennial report to the Department of Public Instruction, containing a summary of the returns made to them by the assessors of their respective districts, shall be prepared by the Superintendent and forwarded to the county commissioners of the several counties for the required purpose. Sec. 9. That all acts or parts of acts inconsistent herewith are hereby repealed. Approved July 15th, 1897. ANNUAL PER CAPITA SCHOOL TAX. AN ACT to authorize and empower the school directors and controllers of the several school districts within this Commonwealth to levy and collect a per capita tax, annually, for school purposes. Section 1. Be it enacted, etc., That on and after the passage of this act it shall be law ful for the school directors or school controllers of any city, borough or township within this Commonwealth, to levy and collect, annually, a per capita tax of one dollar for school purposes from each and every male inhabitant of the age of twenty-one years and upwards within their respective districts. Sec. 2. The per capita tax authorized in the first section of this act shall be levied and collected at the same time and in the same manner as school taxes are now levied and collected by law. Sec. 3. The per capita tax herein authorized shall be in lieu of the occupation tax for school purposes, and this act shall in no wise limit or abridge the power of school directors or controllers to levy a tax on real and personal property for school and building purposes. Approved July 22d, 1897. HISTORIC PROGRESS AS VIEWED BY A HISTORIAN. E talk of our History. No man can noble labors of your Society, and of others in this country, for the preservation of memorials belonging to our brief but most important past. We can never collect too much of them, nor ponder them too carefully, for they mark the era of a new civilization. But that interesting past presses so closely upon our sight that it seems still a portion of the present; the glimmering dawn preceding the noontide of to-day. I shall not be misunderstood, then, if I say that there is no such thing as human history. Nothing can be more profoundly, sadly true. The annals of mankind have never been written, never can be written; nor would it be within human capacity to read them if they were written. We have a leaf or two torn from the great book of human fate as it flutters in the storm winds ever sweeping across the earth. We decipher them as best we can with purblind eyes, and endeavor to learn their mystery as we float along to the abyss; but it is all confused babble, hieroglyphics of which the key is lost. Consider but a moment. The island on which this city stands is as perfect a site. as man could desire for a great, commercial, imperial city. Byzantium, which the lords of the ancient world built for the capital of the earth; which the tem No. 3. perate and vigorous Turk in the days of his stern military discipline plucked from the decrepit hands which held the scepter of Cæsar and Constantine, and for the succession to which the present lords of Europe are wrangling,-not Byzantium, nor hundred gated Thebes, nor London nor Liverpool, Paris nor Moscow, can surpass the future certainties of this thirteen-mile-long Manhattan. And yet it was but yesterday - for what are two centuries in the boundless vista of the past-that the Mohawk and the Mohican were tomahawking and scalping each other throughout these regions, and had been doing so for centuries; while the whole surface of this island, now groaning under millions of wealth which oppress the imagination, hardly furnished a respectable hunting ground for a single sachem, in his war paint and his moccasins, who imagined himself the proprietor of the soil. But yesterday Cimmerian darkness, primeval night. To day, grandeur, luxury, wealth, power. I come not here tonight to draw pictures or pour forth dithyrambics that I may gratify your vanity or my own, whether municipal or national. To appreciate the unexampled advantages bestowed by the Omnipotent upon this favored Republic, this youngest child of civilization, is rather to oppress the thoughtful mind with an overwhelming sense of responsibility; to [ sadden with quick-coming fears; to torture with reasonable doubts. The world's great hope is here. The future of humanity at least for that cycle in which we are now revolving-depends mainly upon the manner in which we deal with our great trust. The good old times! Where and when were those good old times? "All times when old are good," says Byron, 'And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death," says the great master of morals and humanity. But neither fools nor sages, neither individuals nor nations, have any other light to guide them along the track which all must tread, save that long glimmering vista of yesterdays which grow so swiftly fainter and fainter as the present fades into the past. And I believe it possible to discover a law out of all this apparently chaotic whirl and bustle, this tangled skein of human affairs, as it spins itseif through the centuries. That law is Progress,slow, confused, contradictory, but ceaseless development, intellectual and moral, of the human race. It is of Human Progress that I speak to-night. It is of Progress that I find a startling result when I survey the spectacle which the American Present displays. This nation stands on the point toward which other people are moving, the starting-point, not the goal. It has put itself-or rather Destiny has placed it-more immediately than other nations in subordination to the law governing all bodies political, inexorably as Kepler's law controls the motions of the planets. The law is Progress; the result, Democracy. Sydney Smith once alluded, if I remember rightly, to a person who allowed himself to speak disrespectfully of the equator. I have a strong objection to be suspected of flattering the equator. Yet were it not for that little angle of 23° 27' 26", which it is good enough to make with the plane of the ecliptic, the history of this earth and of "all which it inherit" would have been essentially modified, even if it had not been altogether a blank. Out of the obliquity of the equator has come forth our civilization. It was long ago observed by one of the most thoughtful writers that ever dealt with human history, John von Herder, that it was to the gradual shading away of zones and alterations of seasons that the vigor and variety of mankind were attributable. I have asked where and when were the good old times? This earth of ours has been spinning about in space, great philosophers tell us, some few hundred millions of years. We are not very familiar with our predecessors on this continent. For the present, the oldest inhabitant must be represented here by the man of Natchez, whose bones were unearthed not long ago under the Mississippi bluffs in strata which were said to argue him to be at least one hundred thousand years old. Yet he is a mere modern, a parvenu on this planet, if we are to trust illustrious teachers of science, compared with the men whose bones and whose implements have been found in high mountainvalleys and gravel-pits of Europe; while these again are thought by the same authorities to be descendants of races which flourished many thousands of years before, and whose relics science is confidently expecting to discover, although the icy sea had once engulfed them and their dwelling-places. We of to-day have no filial interest in the man of Natchez. He was no ancestor of ours, nor have he and his descendants left traces along the dreary track of their existence to induce a desire to claim relationship with them. We are Americans; but yesterday we were Europeans-Netherlanders, Saxons, Normans, Swabians, Celts; and the day before yesterday, Asiatics, Mongolians, what you will. The orbit of civilization, so far as our perishing records enable us to trace it, seems preordained from East to West. China, India, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Rome, are successively lighted up as the majestic orb of day moves over them; and as he advances still farther through his storied through his storied and mysterious zodiac, we behold the shadows of evening as surely falling on the lands which he leaves behind him. Man still reeled on-falling, rising again, staggering forward with hue and cry at his heels-a wounded felon daring to escape from the prison to which the grace of God had inexorably doomed him. And still there was progress. Besides the sword, two other instruments grew every day more potent, the pen and the purse. The power of the pen soon created a stupendous monopoly. Clerks obtained privilege of murder because of their learning; a Norman king gloried in the appellation of "fine clerk," because he could spell; the sons of serfs and washer women became high pontiffs, put their | abysses and dreary deserts which lie feet on the necks of emperors, through the might of education, and appalled the souls of tyrants with their weird anathemas. Naturally, the priests kept the talisman of learning to themselves. How should education help them to power and pelf, if the people could participate in the mystic spell? The icy dead hand of the Church, ever extended, was filled to overflowing by trembling baron and superstitious hind. But there was another power steadily augmenting the magic purse of Fortunatus, with its clink of perennial gold. Commerce changed clusters of hovels, cowering for protection under feudal castles, into powerful cities. Burghers wrested or purchased liberties from their lords and masters. And still man struggled on. An experimenting friar, fond of chemistry, in one corner of Europe, put nitre, sulphur, and charcoal together; a sexton or doctor, in another obscure nook, carved letters on blocks of wood; and lo! there were explosions shaking the solid earth, and causing the iron-clad man on horseback to reel in his saddle. It was no wonder Dr. Faustus was supposed to have sold his soul to the fiend. Whence but from devilish alliance could he have derived such power to strike down the grace of God? Speech, the alphabet, Mount Sinai, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Nazareth, the wandering of the nations, the feudal system, Magna Charta, gunpowder, printing, the Reformation, the mariner's compass, America-here are some of the landmarks of human motion. As we pause for a moment's rest, after our rapid sweep through the eons and the centuries, have we not the right to record proof of man's progress since the days of the rhinoceros-eaters of Bedfordshire, of the man of Natchez? And for details and detached scenes in the general phantasmagoria, which has been ever shifting before us, we may seek for illustration, instruction, or comfort in any age or land where authentic record can be found. We may take a calm survey of passionate democratic Greece in her great civil war through the terse, judicial narrative of Thucydides; we may learn to loathe despotism in that marvelous portrait-gallery of crime which the somber and terrible Tacitus has bequeathed; we may cross the yawning between two civilizations over that stately viaduct of a thousand arches which the great hand of Gibbon has constructed; we may penetrate to the inmost political and social heart of England, during a period of nine years, by help of the magic wand of Macaulay; we may linger in the stately portico to the unbuilt dome which the daring genius of Buckle consumed his life in devising; we may yield to the sweet fascinations which ever dwell in the picturesque pages of Prescott; we may investigate rules, apply and ponder examples: but the detail of history is essentially a blank, and nothing could be more dismal than its pursuit, unless the mind be filled by a broad view of its general scheme. WH OF SCHOOL ORDER. BY E. CULVER. WHILE in a pretty village last spring, I resided for some time with the president of the school board. He was a merchant, an intelligent man, and an extensive reader of newspapers and books. The entire number of pupils in the town was about 450, and 50 or 60 of these were in the high school. The principal of this school was also superintendent of the other schools. All the pupils except those of two small primary schools were in one central building. The principal was a very earnest, active, healthy man of rather more than ordinary attainments in science, and was fairly popular among the pupils and people; but I soon saw that the president of the school board had measured him up critically and pronounced him wanting as a school principal, because of his lacking the important element of government. To settle the matter in my own mind, I visited the school several times, and came to the conclusion that the president was correct, and that this want of government vitiated the entire work of the principal, and more, that the other 390 in the primary and grammar departments were deteriorated considerably thereby. I was standing in a street near the main building just before school time, and the bell was sounded once or twice to show that in five minutes more the morning exercises would begin-and what a rush of old and young! Some did not |