These statements were scarcely carried out in fact; in Pennsylvania educational advantages were few, and among some classes education was sorely hampered. The Quakers did not encourage absolute illiteracy, but they thought knowledge of the "three R's" was enough; they distinctly disapproved of any extended scholarship, as it fostered undue pride and provoked idleness. The Germans were worse; their own historians, the Calvinist and Lutheran preachers, Schlatter and Muhlenberg, are authority; there were among them a few schools of low grade; but the introduction of the public school system among the Germans was resisted by indignation meetings and litigation. The Tunkers degenerated so that they did not desire a membership of educated persons, and would have liked to destroy all books but religious ones. It was said by these German settlers that schooling made boys lazy and dissatisfied on the farms, and that religion would suffer by too much learning. As Bayard Taylor puts it in his Pennsylvania Farmer:—
"Book learning gets the upper hand and work is slow and slack,
And they that come long after us will find things gone to wrack."
School-teachers in the middle and southern colonies were frequently found in degraded circumstances; many of them were redemptioners and exported convicts. I have frequently noted such newspaper advertisements as this from the Maryland Gazette:—
"Ran away: A Servant man who followed the occupation of a Schoolmaster, much given to drinking and gambling."
So universal was drunkenness among schoolmasters that a chorus of colonial "gerund-grinders" might sing in Goldsmith's words:—
"Let schoolmasters puzzle their brains
With grammar and nonsense and learning,
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genius a better discerning."
Scotland furnished the best and the largest number of schoolmasters to the colonies.