own people to the ability to comprehend and improve such an opportunity as never before in history was offered to a population so small.

But all this has passed away in the advent of a new generation. From the interesting data furnished and indorsed by public authority, we learn that the publication of the great natural resources of West Virginia practically dates from the year of the Centennial Exposition, in Philadelphia, in 1876. During the past twenty years the people of the United States have first come to the knowledge of the importance of this new Commonwealth, the child of the great war for the preservation of the Union. From the numerous public documents-which read more like a romance of industry than a mass of substantial information-we learn that while in 1863 there was but one railroad in West Virginia, there are now but 11 of its 54 counties destitute of this manner of communication, and that during the year 1892 this State led the Union in the extent of railroad construction. Three great lines now connect this State with the Atlantic Coast and the Mississippi Valley, and numerous arteries of these great systems and supplementary routes have opened portions of the Commonwealth hitherto little known. From a meager production of coal for domestic use in 1863, the output of the mines in 1892 was 10,000,000 tons, from 200 mines, employing 15,000 workmen, representing a population one-sixth as large as the entire inhabitants of West Virginia in 1860. Ten million acres of West Virginia soil are underlaid by a coal deposit 10 feet thick, a larger area than the coal district of Great Britain, with an estimated output of 10,000,000,000 tons. It is estimated that the coal of West Virginia exceeds the value of the gold and silver mines of the Pacific States. Only 3 of the 54 counties are destitute of the coal supply. It is asserted that the present population of the United States could be supplied with its usual consumption of coal for 1,000 years, from West Virginia alone."

One-half the State is still "in the woods," the virgin forests furnishing a larger amount of hard-wood timber than any other State, and the growing timber industry giving occupation to another army of 15,000 men." The great lumber belt is 200 by 25 miles in extent, 7,000 square miles-nearly as extensive as the State of New Jersey. The timber crop at present is valued at $70,000,000; 500,000,000 feet being put on the market each year. An ex-governor of West Virginia declares that this State "has more of a surplus of hard wood than any other ten States of the Union." The altitude of the Staie, from 500 to 5,000 feet above tide water, and the climate are favorable to a vast and vigorous growth of forest life, 32 reliable varieties of hard and soft wood lumber being furnished for the markets of the world.

The world's production of iron in 1890 amounted to 26,500,000 gross tons, of which the United States produced 33 per cent. West Virginia shares with its neighboring States, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio, a generous deposit of this material, the foundation of all manufacturing industries. In the production of coke West Virginia stands next to Pennsylvania, in 1892 supplying 1,313,449 tons. The salt wells at one time supported a leading industry in the State, and although the production of salt has declined by competition with other States, it still awaits a future development that may become of great importance. George Washington, whose hand and eye seem to have been on everything of value in the new Union, in 1775 located an acre of land near Charleston, W. Va., as a natural curiosity, a "burning spring." To-day the oil wells and gas plants of the State are rapidly encroaching on Pennsylvania in extent and importance; indeed, one oil district, Sistersville, is the most extensive in the world. It is asserted that West Virginia led Pennsylvania thirty years in the utilization of natural gas for manufactures and the use of coal oil. The traveler by night along the valley of the Ohio in this State is lighted on his way by these fiery signals of the amazing wealth stored in these vast reservoirs of nature. This industry is still in its infancy, being the result of the past twenty years experimenting, and its outcome can not be predicted. An experiment in paving a city street with fire brick in Charleston, W. Va., planned by Dr. John P. Hall, has given to several of the larger cities of the Union this admirable pavement, and this State can furnish the material to an extent not even yet understood. The building stones of the State are numerous and of great value. The wealth of West Virginia in mineral waters has been long understood. Its sontheastern border is crowded with attractive summer resorts, where the health-giving waters and beautiful scenery are every year more widely appreciated.

But for the lover of nature and the primitive industry of man-the cultivation of the soil-West Virginia especially deserves the name given by the jolly "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe" in the early days of the Old Dominion to the entire region beyond the Blue Ridge, "God's country." Although sadly neglected, like the entire central mountain region of the old South (as extensive as the German Empire, and, according to expert testimony, capable of an agricultural developement as great as Germany), during the first one hundred years of headlong immigration from the old Last to the future Northwest and Southwest, this country bides its time and unless paralyzed by some impracticable political or industrial policy, in half a century from to-day may become one of the most attractive portions of the Republic.

West Virginia touches upon the northern and southern belts of production with a good portion of her own acres capable of successful cultivation. Her productions are corn, wheat, oats, buckwheat, and vegetables. In garden stuffs she has a great future ahead. The fruits of the North, apples, berries, and especially the grape, can be grown here to great advantage. But in the possession of a vast area of the precious blue grass there is no American State which has such a mine of wealth. No traveler who has looked on the lovely spectacle of the rolling country just retired from the valley of the Ohio in its early summer dress, or on the cultivated farms reaching the summits of the grass-covered hills and mountains, can doubt that in the support of cattle, sheep, and all the varieties of animal industry the State has a remarkable opportunity ahead. No estimate of the loss by the old-time, ignorant, provincial habit of farming to this portion of the country can be made. But every dollar now expended upon the coming generation of the youth of West Virginia to lift her people above the wasteful and crude habits of using the land will come back, before many days, in an era of prosperity. As we now look upon our great Eastern cities, in the midsummer swarming with an army of "the unemployed," too often people who are being nursed into a chronic class of the improvident and indolent, dependent upon the crumbs that fall from the tables of wealth in old communities, we long for a new departure in public charity which shall put a fist with steam power behind it to force a multitude of these dependent families to a land like West Virginia, where, with half the toil and sacrifice endured by the pioneers of every American Commonwealth, they could live in peace, comfort, and with the gain of character, self-respect, and hope for the children which can never come to them in their present surroundings.

There can be no doubt that the present resources of West Virginia are competent to support a larger population than is now gathered in any State of the Union. And it only requires a liberal home policy, an extension of common school facilities, with an annex of industrial education, to realize the most enthusiastic expectations of its best informed citizens. So far the State is being saved, except in a few mining districts, from an undue per cent of the lower element of recent foreign labor. It has the added advantage of exemption from the presence of great masses of the lower orders of colored people, who for many years must be both a tax and a strong appeal to Christian wisdom, charity, and patriotism in the majority of Southern States.

It is almost incredible to a traveler, for the first time made acquainted with this great and beautiful mountain State, that with a steady development during thirty years past, there are still a smaller number of people living upon the 24,715 square miles than within the area of 30 miles in and around the city of Boston. It may be that in this attractive mountain land, at the center of the old Union, will be developed the class we all pray for, that will inaugurate a movement back from the dangers and dependencies of city life, where thousands now welter in poverty, hopeless of better things, to this glorious open country, to begin anew the struggle for an independent and valuable American citizenship.

But in no respect has West Virginia given such evidence of vitality and progressive spirit as in the extraordinary development of public education during the past thirty years. It is doubtful if any State of the Union in 1860 could present a more meager array of educational opportunities and a more discouraging spectacle of widespread illiteracy than this portion of the Old Dominion. There are no statistics of the relative illiteracy of different portions of the country, of decisive valne, previous to the civil war. But the testimony of all the more observing older people of this entire region of Virginia west of the Alleghanies, including the rural districts of the present southwest Virginia and West Virginia, bears hardly upon both theso States in this respect. Up to the breaking ont of the civil war the present 51 counties of West Virginia were but poorly supplied with what was the only gennino educational opportunity offered by old Virginia, the colleges and academies established for the higher and secondary education. At this period Virginia east of the Alleghanies was, without question, the portion of the South best supplied with these facilities for superior instruction. Half a dozen colleges of average reputation, with the University of Virginia-then and perhaps still the leader of Southern universities of the higher grade-and a score of academies, private and denominational, afforded a reasonable opportunity for the schooling of the day to all who were able to pay the cost. Besides this, there was still a considerable group of families who educated their children by home tutorship or in the superior schools of the North and Europe. The real disability was with the masses of the white people, unable to meet the expense and, perhaps, often disinclined to make the proper exertion to secure an education for their children.

The educational "delusion and snare" of that time, the "free school,” practically a pauper school, despised by those to whom it was offered and contemptuously neglected by those whose duty it was to provide an effective scheme of common schooling for the majority of the citizens of the State, was the common method of

dealing with the problem of universal education which had brooded like a nightmare over the thoughts of the great fathers of the Commonwealth and made Thomas Jefferson, in his old age, almost despair of the Republic. There was a law in 1860 by which two-thirds of the voters of a county could adopt a modified system of common schooling. But with the limitations of the suffrage and the indisposition of the well-to-do people to "tax themselves for the education of other people's children," only a few counties of the State had put it into active operation. Of these, however, five leading counties in West Virginia were conspicuous, and the little cities of Wheeling and Charleston had laid the foundation for their present system of public schools. There was but one college (Bethany) founded in 1840, and a few secondary academies of note had been established in this portion of the State. But it may be that even in this deprivation was found the most favorable condition for the establishment of the people's common school. The neighboring States of Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina, in 1860, like the more important of the Gulf States, were almost clogged to repletion with this class of academical schools, chiefly denominational, which, although of great service to the communities in which they were established, often became the most obstinate opponents to the establishment of an effective system of free popular education. The great revival of nationalism that flung the majority of the people of these West Virginia counties, in 1861, out of the arms of their neglectful mother into close companionship with the adjacent Commonwealths of the North, the public attention every where directed to this supreme act, and the inspiration of a four years' conflict for "Liberty and Union," doubtless gave a prodigious impulse to the educational spirit.

It was observed that the committee on education in the first constitutional convention of West Virginia, held in 1863, was composed largely of delegates from the counties that had already adopted a public school system, as far as was possible under the laws of the Old Dominion. The clause in the fundamental law relating to education has a determined ring, prophetic of all that has been achieved in the Commonwealth. West Virginia was the first Southern State to establish the entire American system of common schools. Even during the distractions of the civil war, in 1863, this provision was placed in the constitution, and, with only a slight amendment in the revised constitution of 1872, it remains the foundation of the people's education in West Virginia to-day.

This clause of the constitution reads as follow:

"The legislature shall provide, as soon as practicable, for the establishment of a thorough and efficient system of free schools. They shall provide for the support of such schools by appropriating thereto the interest of the invested school fund, the net proceeds of all forfeitures, confiscations, and fines accruing to this State under the laws thereof, and by general taxation on persons and property, or otherwise. They shall also provide for raising in each township, by the authority of the people thereof, such a proportion of the amount required for the support of free schools therein as shall be prescribed by general laws.”

The story of the remarkable progress of the common school in West Virginia, during the thirty years from this fortunate beginning, in 1863, is so well told by ex-superintendent of free schools, Hon. Benjamin S. Morgan, in an elaborate sketch accompanying the State school report of 1891-92, that it is only for the information of readers outside the State that even a brief summary of the successive steps of this achievement is made in the present essay. Suffice to say that the first legislature of the new Commonwealth, the last of the illustrious family of States born from the vast territory of the Old Dominion, distinguished itself by decisive and wise action on the subject of public education. Responding to the suggestion of Governor Arthur I. Boreman, the two houses of the legislature placed on their educational committees a group of men already known and tried as successful teachers and resolute advocates of the inalienable right of the children to schooling for American citizenship. After a three months' discussion of two reports, on December 10, 1863, a scheme of public instruction was inaugurated and put in operation by the election of Rev. William R. White as State superintendent of free schools.

The system was substantially that of the adjoining States of Ohio and Pennsylvania. It placed West Virginia, in point of time, seven years in advance of the mother State, which did not move until 1870, and then came to her youngest child for her great executive superintendent of education, a descendant of the old Ruffner family, commemorated in the First Presbyterian Church of Charleston. It contemplated a general system of free education for all classes and both races at public expense, sufficiently broad and flexible to admit of a complete development through the advancing grades of elementary, grammar, secondary, normal, and university education. No institution so radical and far-reaching in all its relations to society as the American common school springs at a bound to a vigorous life in any Commonwealth. It is not at all singular that a State in the condition of West Virginia, born amid the opening throes of a terrible civil war, could not, during the progress of the conflict, educationally stand erect. It is not to be wondered at that, even in 1865, the year

of the advent of peace, the new school law was in operation in only 20 counties and partially in 11 more, the number of schoolhouses being 133 and the number of schools 431, the enrollment of pupils 15,972, the average length of the schools 49 days, and the whole amount expended for free schooling $7,772. But more favorable was the report for 1866, showing that the number of schools taught and the attendance of pupils had doubled: Schools 935, pupils 34,219, and the length of the country school had been extended to 69 days.

The advent of peace was the signal for a most important forward movement in the educational policy of the State. In 1867 three of the present State normal schools were established, among them the Fairmont School, the leading seminary from the first and, to-day, one of the most effective schools of its kind in the Southern States. That the new Commonwealth of West Virginia, just getting on its new State legs from the wreck, discouragement, and disintegration of a four years' civil war, should have done, as a matter of course, what Ohio, the fifth State in population and not behind the first in importance in the Union, has not yet been able to achieve and what Virginia waited twenty years longer to obtain-establish a system of State normal schools-is certainly one of the anomalies of American life.

But the brave little Mountain State, with a population less than 800,000 and an assessed valuation of $190,000,000, took another forward step and at the session of the legislature in 1867 passed the act establishing a State agricultural college. This institution was founded on the national appropriation of land for agricultural and mechanical colleges to all the States, passed during the war period, July 2, 1862. West Virginia received 150,000 acres of public land which was sold for $90,000; a sum increased by legislative appropriation to $110,000. As in many of the States, the early establishment of the college was made easy by a gift from the city of Morgantown, Monongalia County, of school property, including one of the most attractive university sites in the Union. In 1868 the first building was erected. The board of regents laid the foundation of the new college on broad educational lines. President Martin was installed in 1867, and held the position till 1875. In 1868 124 students were gathered. In 1881, after a dozen years of gradual growth, the institution, under the brief presidency of William L. Wilson, now of eminent reputation in statesmanship, was practically reorganized and placed on a proper basis of instruction, with eight distinct departments and professional schools for law and medicine.

In 1870, only seven years from the establishment of the system, the birthyear of the common schools in Virginia, Superintendent Williams reported 2,113 schoolhouses, an increase of 30 per cent from the previous year and 87,330 children enrolled in school, a gain of 20 per cent in enrollment and 40 per cent in average attendance. Well might Governor Stevenson, in 1871, declare, "The public school system may now be regarded as a part of our fixed policy." In 1872 three additional normal schools were established, making six institutions supported by the State for the instruction of teachers.

The summing up of this remarkable nine years' work by State Superintendent Pendleton, in 1872, is a record of which no American Commonwealth, save our new Western States, which began their educational career with the great advantage of the national public land fund, on a virgin soil and generally with a trained school population, can boast. West Virginia, with no part nor lot in the original distribution of school lands to the States west of the Alleghanies, largely by her own unaided effort, was able to say to the people of the United States, in 1872, in the eloquent language of her State superintendent:

"Reviewing our progress in the noble efforts of the State to provide for the free education of the whole people, we have reason for profound gratitude at our comparative success. With a million and a quarter of capital invested in school property; 3,000 schools in actual operation, and three-quarters of a million annually contributed to run them; 90,000 children under intellectual and moral training; a number of graded and high schools; 4 normal schools in vigorous operation, for which we are annually expending out of the State treasury over $8,000; a university on which we bestow over $16,000, and other private and corporate institutions, among them one college largely endowed, and through its 400 graduates already enjoying a national reputation, West Virginia may well be proud of her position in this highest expression of a people's patriotism and enterprise. Within less than a single decade there was, outside of the city of Wheeling, scarcely a free school in the State. Now they rise up to greet us beside every highway, and betoken a future of rapid and vigorous improvement. This is a revolution that can not go backward. It creates its own momentum. It moves by a power within, which increases as it moves, and which strikes out the light and heat of its own vitality."

And here came in another incident that fitly illustrates an important characteristic of the American system of universal education, that it is not dependent on the great political divisions by which the public affairs of this country, as of all constitutional Governments, are carried on.. Up to 1872 the State had adhered to the policy of the

political party which carried the nation victoriously through the war, and was responsible for the reorganization of the ex-Confederate States and the amendments to the Constitution of the United States. But under the lead of the successful Democratic party, in 1872, a new constitution was set up in West Virginia, and the State has since been committed to the principles and policy of this political organization. But in this change, which came about with the usual display of excited partisan feeling, there was no break in the progress of the people's schools, without which no party in the United States can live and the best party will inevitably destroy the Republic. It is not the name of the political organization but the quality of the people who compose it that decides, in the last result, what shall be the tendeney and outcome of legislation in any American State. Under the new constitution the school law of 1873 was passed, which remains substantially the present law of the State. We abbreviate Superintendent Morgan's statement in the "History of Education in West Virginia" concerning the provisions of this statute:

The schools are free and supported by the income of the State school fund, a State tax of 10 cents on $100 of all taxable property, with provision for the local taxation of school districts, including the right to establish graded schools in cities, villages, and populous country districts. A vote of three fifths of the people is required for the establishment of a free high school. In 1892 there were 145 systems of graded and 17 public high schools in the State. "Hang a good thing up for seven years and you will have a use for it." Old Virginia "hung up" Thomas Jefferson's plan for the edneation of the Old Dominion, at the time in some respects the broadest that had been presented to the world, for about one hundred years, to see it taken down from the high shelf by her own youngest child in 1863 as an indispensable article of furniture in the setting up of its new housekeeping. With the additions and enlargements of one hundred years of American experience, the State, in 1892, has created practically a correlated system; in the words of Huxley, "Reaching from the gutter to the university," needing only the improvements later referred to in this essay as the most enlightened demand of its own educational public to place the Mountain State at the head of its own section, well up in the first rank of educational American Commonwealths.

It is unnecessary to pursue in detail this interesting record of the steady growth of the common school in West Virginia, through the administration of nine State superintendents, to that of the present earnest and patriotic official, Hon. Virgil A. Lewis, now in the second year of his good work. The most original feature in this period is the movement for the improved grading of the country district school, inaugurated in 1875, under the county superintendence of Mr. A. L. Wade, in Monongalia County, the seat of the State University.

Here has been, for a century, the great stumbling block of the American system of public instruction-the proper organization, as respects a graded course of instruction and its application to the peculiar needs of the country district schools, in which the majority of the children in the Union and nine-tenths of the youth in the sixteen Southern States receive their entire schooling. It is indeed only recently that the oldest States have deemed it necessary or possible to do anything for the relief of the almost insuperable defects of such a condition as still prevails through wide regions of the country; where the rural district school goes on through its accustomed round from three to eight months in the year, practically managed by local trustees, often kept by the man or woman personally most agreeable to “ the committee," with no provision for compulsory attendance; the children coming to school according to the nearness or distance of their place of residence, the attractiveness of the schoolhouse, and the popularity of the teacher; every little squad really "going on its own hook," sometimes almost insisting on individual teaching; usually the school of 20 to 50 children in one room, chopped up into "mincemeat" by a division into little classes that makes the daily session a headlong race of hearing short lessons, with scarcely an attempt at the proper class or general work that tells on the entire school and promotes that most valuable discipline, the instruction together of a large number, by which each pupil enjoys the advantages of a roundabout view of the subject by all. Edmund Burke says: "Every man becomes ten men by working with his fellows." There is still no department of American education which, in proportion to its cost, its momentous influence on the national life, and the national sense of its great value to the Republic, exhibits such a melancholy waste of money and energy, such confusion and failure of good educational results as are apparent to every competent observer in the ordinary country district school. And still, since this department of the common school is so common, so near the mass of the people, so dependent on a great variety of conditions peculiar to each locality for its success, the efforts to reform it by public legislation, up to the period of the general revival of education that followed the close of the civil war, had been few and ineffectual. It was characteristic that the one State of the Union born amid the confusion and terror of civil war, should not only, as declared by County Supt. A. L. Wade, in 1876, "have accomplished more in the work of building schoolhouses and setting