Only to the last third of the period under review has the electric telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the public and private life of every civilized spot upon the globe. It traverses all lands and all seas. The forty miles of wire with which it started from Washington City have become many millions. Its length of line in the United States is about the same with that of the mail-routes, and a similar equality probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have nearly as much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire may not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of Morse compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage having been conferred on other countries. It is the property of mankind, and the comparison must be between present and past, not between any two countries of the present. Strictly, a comparison is not possible, nothing like magnetic communication having been known forty years ago, unless to the half imagination, half realization of one or two scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a difference in degree—the telegraph one of kind. Against eighteen hundred miles of wagon-road we set seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred thousand miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of poles, the old days disappear entirely—the patriots become pre-historic. Yet modern self-conceit is somewhat checked by the reflection that the career of these two great agents of intercommunication has but just opened; that their management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and that the next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly comprehended. So far as prediction can now be ventured, a force and pathway more economical than coal and the rail will not soon be forthcoming; nor is Canton apt to "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a minute over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may be harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where it did with Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range projectiles; but even this age of hurry will contentedly wait a little for that.
Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian, financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.
West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in 1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one—the Pittsburg Gazette—existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871, with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875), with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and 622—an advance of sixfold.
The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth. To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all, leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has fully kept pace with every other means of culture is patent enough. The Congressional Library has risen in half the century from the shelves of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand volumes—an accumulation not surpassed in '76 by more than two libraries in Europe. It now demands a separate edifice of its own, fit to stand by the side of the fine structures which have within a generation recreated the architectural aspect of the Federal metropolis with the most stately government-offices in the world. Other public libraries, belonging to colleges, schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to some of the great European establishments, they are generally better adapted to the purposes of popular instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh and available, little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and the common school, their catalogues prove, as do the bookcases of private houses, that the newest and deepest results of European thought and inquiry are eagerly sought and used by our people.
Our system of public schools, long classed among the "peculiar institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in scope and efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not in their claim of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum. The different States have engaged in a series of competitive experiments for the common good, and cities and counties, in their sphere, labor to the same end. Schools of higher grade are being multiplied, and the examination of teachers, still lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits the drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with the intellectual police of eight millions of children—the number said by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have been enrolled in 1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and 3,642,694 by the censuses of 1870, '60 and '50. Little more than half this number is estimated by the Bureau to represent the average daily attendance, which is quite compatible with the attendance, for the greater part of the school-year, of nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A comparison of the number enrolled and the entire supposed number of children between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two millions and a half outside the public schools. Of these private schools will account, and account well, for a large proportion. These are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal schools—a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a long time to come.
In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not above, comparison with those of the most advanced European states. An annual outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five millions of dollars, with an investment in buildings, ground, etc. of a hundred and sixty-six millions, implies a determination that should be rewarded with the most unexceptionable results. It reaches eighteen dollars yearly, leaving out the interest on the fixed stock, for each child in daily attendance. Such an expenditure, trebling, we believe, that of Prussia, ought to secure better teachers and a higher range of instruction. It must be said, however, that the duties of the school-boards are as honestly and economically discharged as those of any other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest where common schools have been longest established and most thoroughly studied; and that the statistics certainly show a steady advance in their efficiency. That is the truest test. Any pecuniary means are justifiable by the end. If common schools, themselves a means to a higher education, mental and moral, than they can directly afford, take some part of the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's decaying, it is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress more genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are the exponents.
It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the one just closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still unkempt continent, the school actually precedes the pioneer. Choose his homestead where he may, the sixteenth section is staked out before it. From it the rills of knowledge soon trickle along the first furrows, as strange to the soil as its new products. It provides the modern settler in advance with an equipment, mental and material, if not moral, altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor; cuts his wheat with a cradle—or, given a neighbor or two, a reaper—instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of culture and intelligence which must adhere to any ménage of to-day and were out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that travels West now is a different thing from that which went West a hundred years ago.
Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as he has done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his shortcomings are notable. He has not learned how to eat his cake and have it. He works the virgin soil as the miner does the coal-seam. What Nature has placed in it he takes out, and, until forced by the pressure of his friends and enemies, the cities, returns no nest-egg of future fertility. So it is that many portions of the rural East have to be resettled and started afresh in the process of agricultural redemption. A hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat to the acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from thirty to fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the sum of American progress. Land was the only property of the country originally, and subsequently of different parts of it in succession. It was used like any other commodity, and worn out like leather or cloth. The original cuticle of the continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is to induce the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may be complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of Iowa and California in the shape of wheat is going on at what must be esteemed a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a class, do not seem to be losing ground. Their glebes have risen in value from thirty-two hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six hundred ten years later, and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This has been accompanied by a diminution of their average extent, the farm of 1870 covering a hundred and fifty-three acres. This is small enough, considering the capital necessary for stock in these days of improved and costly implements, when a farmer can no longer pack his entire kit in a cart. It matches closely the size of English holdings, where agricultural science is at its height. The French peasant-farmers, with their plats of three and four acres, are chained to the spade and hoe, and their steading becomes a poultry-yard—a consummation we are not yet in sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most luxurious coach that carried a First Congressman.