Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1

by George S. Boutwell

"What, then, will be our position? The way ought to be open for the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln; but there are those who demand a compromise as a step necessary and preliminary to that event. I do not now speak of the demand made upon States, in their sovereign capacity, to repeal certain laws, concerning personal liberty, alleged to be unconstitutional. . . .

"The compromises of which I speak are the various propositions, which proceed upon the idea that the election by the people of a President of the Republic, in constitutional ways and by constitutional means only, shall not be consummated by his peaceful inauguration, unless the character of the government is fundamentally changed previously, or pledges given that such changes shall be permitted. I see no great evidence that these demands are to be acceded to; but I see that the demands themselves attack the fundamental principles of republican liberty. If disappointed men, be they few or many, be they conspirators and traitors, or misguided zealots merely, can interpret their will, and arrest or divert or contravene the public judgment, constitutionally expressed, then our government is no longer one of laws, but a government of men."

XXII AS SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION

In the early autumn of 1855 the Board of Education elected me to the office of secretary of the board. The position was offered to Mr. George B. Emerson, who declined to accept it for the reason that he was unwilling to perform the necessary labor. My predecessor was Barnas Sears, who resigned to accept the presidency of Brown University. I made no effort to secure the appointment; indeed, I was doubtful as to the wisdom of accepting it. I had been a member of the board for several years, and I had had a limited acquaintance with Mr. Mann during his term of office. Mr. Mann had had a brilliant career. He entered upon his duties at a time when the public schools of Massachusetts were in a low condition, and under his administration there had been a revival of interest, whose force is felt, I imagine, to this day. He attacked the customs and ridiculed the prejudices of the people, made war upon the practice of corporal punishment, engaged in a controversy with the Boston schoolmasters, and in the end he either achieved a victory whenever a stand was made against him, or he laid the foundation of ultimate success.

Dr. Sears was a man of peace. He was a carefully educated scholar and progressive in his ideas, but he relied upon quiet labor and carefully prepared arguments. He was at the head of the school system for the long period of thirteen years, and in that time great progress was made. He supplemented Mr. Mann by a steady and sturdy effort to establish permanently the reforms which Mr. Mann had inaugurated. One obnoxious relic of the ancient ways remained—the district system. In 1840 Governor Morton had called the school districts of the State, "Little Democracies." They were in fact little nurseries of selfishness and intrigue. In the selection of teachers, in the erection and repairs of school houses, and even in the business of furnishing the firewood, there were little intrigues and arrangements by which interested parties secured the appointment of a son or daughter to the place of teacher, or a contract for wood or work. The election of the committee not infrequently turned upon the interest of some influential citizens.

The great evil was the inefficiency of the teachers. Even in cases where the committeeman was left free to act, he was usually incapable of forming a safe opinion as to the quality of teachers. To be sure the examination and approval of candidates were left to the superintending committee, but most frequently the examination was deferred to a time only one or two days prior to the day when the school was to be commenced and the committee would too often yield to the temptation to keep the candidate even though the qualifications were unsatisfactory. The contest with the district system fell upon me, and during my administration the system was abolished. The end was not accomplished without vigorous opposition.

The citizens of the town of Mansfield took the field and under a memorial to the Legislature they appeared before the Committee on Education. The hearings were public in the hall of the House of Representatives. They made personal attacks upon me—among other things alleging that my traveling expenses were greater than the law allowed. This charge was met successfully by an opinion that had been given by Attorney-General Clifford. I changed the defence to an attack upon the promoters of the movement, and they retreated after a contest of several days; one of the party admitting that they were wrong in their views and wrong in their actions. For the most part, they were well intentioned persons, but not informed, or rather they were misinformed upon the subject of education. They were unimportant in numbers, but for a time they strewed the State with handbills, placards and newspaper articles. They illustrated one half of the fable of the frog and the ox.

In my five years of service I made more than three hundred addresses upon educational topics. In that service I visited most of the cities and towns, met the citizens individually and in masses, visited the factories and shops, and thus I became well acquainted with the habits of the people, their industries and modes of life. In each year I held twelve teachers' institutes and each institute continued five days in session. A portion of each day was given to criticisms, during which time the teachers of the institute and the lecturers were freely criticised by cards sent to the chair without the names of the critics. Hence there was the greatest freedom, and no one on the platform was allowed to escape. It is an unusual thing to find a speaker, even of the highest culture, who can speak an hour without violating the rules of pronunciation, or showing himself negligent in some important particular. The teachers of the teachers gained daily by these critical exercises.

Among the lecturers and teachers were some men of admitted eminence. Agassiz was with me about two years as lecturer in Natural History. His skill in drawing upon the blackboard while he went on with his oral explanation was a constant marvel. He was not a miser in matter of knowledge more than in money. Of his vast stores of knowledge he gave freely to all. Any member of a class could get from him all that he knew upon any topic in his department. When he was ignorant he never hesitated to say: "I don't know." He was very chary of conjectures in science. Indeed, I cannot recall an instance of that sort. He chose to investigate and to wait. In all his ways he was artless. He was a well built man with a massive head and an intelligent face. His presence inspired confidence.

Associated with him by nativity and ties of friendship, was Professor Guyot. Professor Guyot taught physical geography, and previous to 1855 he had wrought a change in public opinion in regard to the method of introducing the science to children. All the then recent text-books omitted physical geography, or reserved it for a brief chapter at the close of the work. Guyot changed the course of study. His motto was this: "We must first consider this earth as one grand individual." On this foundation he built his system. Morse, the father of the inventor of the system of telegraphic communication, was the author of a geography published in the eighteenth century, and he commenced with physical geography. His successors, Cummings, Worcester, and others abandoned that scientific arrangement and introduced the learners to political and descriptive geography. Moreover, their teaching of physical geography was devoted to definitions to be learned by rote. Many of the text-books in use in the schools were framed upon similar erroneous ideas. The first sentence in Murray's Grammar was a definition of the science, and was in fact, the conclusion deduced from a full knowledge of the subject.