the various divergent movements in society with which the names of Dr. Pusey, Dr. Newman, John Stuart Mill, Dr. Thomas Arnold, Rev. F. D. Maurice, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, John Bright and Richard Cobden, are associated. His illustrations are all drawn from English life; but in other countries the disquiet of the time was also marked, and was directed to a quarter equally unmistakable. In the United States it was the era of abolitionism, non-resistance, transcendentalism, comeouterism, Brook Farm, Fourierite phalanxes, and last, but by no means least, of the revival of popular education. Mr. Emerson, speaking for Boston and the neighborhood, said: "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform; not a leading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." It is distinctly to be observed that, much as these movements may have differed in the objects to which they were directed, they were all outcroppings of the general awakening of moral sentiment. Dr. Frothingham is particular to remark that the Transcendental Club and the Massachusetts Board of Education originated at about the same time.1 The two organizations had no formal connection; for the most part, they were the work of different persons, but they both came out of the yeasty condition of the times. Before the middle of this century was reached, the enthusiasm of humanity was beginning to shake the world as never before.

1 George Ripley. Boston, 1882, p. 55.

CHAPTER III

HORACE MANN'S SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS

THE great educational work that Mr. Mann accomplished was so completely an outgrowth of his personal history and character, that it is necessary to give a fuller account of his education, and of the man himself when he entered upon that work, than would otherwise be required.

Horace Mann was born in the town of Franklin, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, May 4, 1796. He was the sixth in descent from William Mann, who came to Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century. Samuel Mann, son of William, graduated at Harvard College in 1665, and afterward preached and taught in the ancient towns of Dedham and Wrentham. His descendants belonged to the plain people of the Commonwealth. This description applies to Thomas Mann, father of Horace, who cultivated a small farm as a means of livelihood. He was a man of feeble health, and died of consumption when his distinguished son was but thirteen years of age. He left in his family a strong impression of intellectual and moral worth, which, with the training that he gave them in the home and in the district school, was his principal legacy to his children. Horace's mother, whose maiden name was Stanley, was a

woman of superior intellect, if not of education, intuitive rather than logical in her mental habit, possessed of rare force of character, and thoroughly devoted to her children. If she did not contribute much to their didactic instruction, she did what was more valuable-start them on right lines of development. Horace continued to live with her on the farm until he was sixteen years of age. The town of Franklin stood second among the towns of the vicinity for intelligence, morality, and worth, and the Manns had a good standing in the town. Thomas Mann possessed more than ordinary talents, intelligence, and moral worth; he neither did or spoke evil, and if his children pitied and relieved the oppressed, and devoted themselves to love and good works, it was because they had profited by his instruction and example. One who was in a position to know maintained that the source of every good work which Horace Mann did, in its causes, could be traced back to the parental home- his devotion to education, his pleading for the slave, his temperance principles and practice, and his sympathy with the wretched and miserable.

The Mann family regimen was marked by the sternness of the olden time, when the new spirit had not yet turned the heart of parents to the children, and the heart of children to the parents. Although the mother and son were devotedly attached to one another, there was still such a distance and reserve maintained between them that he never told her his

1 An unpublished letter written by Miss Lydia B. Mann to Horace Mann.

physical sufferings until they revealed themselves to her, while his feelings he kept studiously to himself. Such severe repression was the more trying to him because he was of a sensitive nature, demonstrative, and full of spirit, and, while maintaining the reserve that always marks the self-respecting soul, was yet disposed to seek close communion with congenial minds. But that old discipline could not have been as cold and heartless as it sometimes seems. In the present case this is fully proved by the manner in which Mr. Mann, in later life, spoke of his mother's deep influence upon him. For himself he could truly say that the strongest and most abiding incentives to excellence by which he was ever animated sprang from that look of solicitude and hope, that heavenly expression of maternal tenderness, when, without the utterance of a single word, his mother looked into his face and silently told him that his life was freighted with a twofold being, for it bore her destiny as well as his own.

She

The straitened circumstances of the family, as well as the demands of the old discipline itself, commended the boy to the rugged nursing of Toil. nursed him too much, he tells us. In the winter he was kept at indoor sedentary occupations that confined him too closely, while the summer labor of the farm was too severe for his strength, and often encroached upon the hours of sleep. He could never remember when he began to work. Play-days he never had, and play-hours were earned by extra efforts. When he came to write, in a letter to a friend, the story of his early life, he found in his experience

one compensation; industry or diligence became his second nature, and he thought it would puzzle any psychologist to tell where it was joined on to the first one. Work became to him what water is to the fish. In adult life he wondered a thousand times to hear people say, "I don't like this business," "I wish I could exchange it for that"; for no matter what he had to do, he never demurred, but set about it like a fatalist, and it was as sure to be done as the sun was to rise. It was in this severe discipline that he formed the habits of industry and application which carried him through the great labors of later years.

Mr. Mann's early education, so called, was such as Massachusetts gave her sons a century ago. His picture of the school that he attended may well be reproduced in its essential features, because he drew it, because he was a part of it, and because it represents in some measure the state of things that he gave the best work of his life to reform. What was called love of knowledge was cramped into a love of books; there was no oral instruction in the school. Books designed for children were few in number, and their contents were meagre and miserable; his teachers were good people, but bad teachers. The memory was the only mental faculty especially appealed to; the most comprehensive generalizations were given to the children instead of the facts upon which they were based; all ideas that did not come from the book were contraband, to be confiscated or thrown overboard by the teacher; with the infinite universe all around the children, ready to be daguerreotyped