(gemütlichkeit), moderation, frugality, contempt for external, empty show, are the graceful realities in the cortege of German family life;-they smooth and facilitate sociable intercourse. Scrupulous exactness in the fulfilment of the task, distinguishes the German mental or mechanical laborer among those of all other nations. These and the like qualities, fused with others that are salient in the Americans, will enhance their value. That is what the German brings and exchanges for being taught how to exist free, self-conscious, self-governing, and self-improving.

There are to be found among the mass of the Germans coarseness and brutality, drunkenness and lawlessness; but neither in such intensity, nor in such thoroughness, as among the Hibernians. And the Germans atone, by good, for those black stains which here and there darken their character.

The Irish and the Germans, with the smaller affluents of the great Teutonic family, such as Swiss and Scandinavians, spread over the land, and strike their roots in the bosom of the American people. They become its intrinsic compound, in larger and larger proportions. Psychologically therefore, as well as physiologically, they influence the powers and the formation of a new population, above all in the West, in whose morally and physically untrammelled spaces, the American historical and humanitarian signification will become completed, the future elaborated and fulfilled.

CHAPTER VIII.

EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE.

FOR past centuries and even now, Europe educates certain classes of society, rather than the masses of the people. America, which in reality has no classes as all such distinctions here are absolutely conventional, and thus absolutely fanciful and illogical-but a people-America inaugurated for the first time in the history of culture, a people educating itself. The educational system, its conception, tendency, agencies and execution in America and Europe are the most conspicuous features in the chain of superiorities and of differences between the new and the old continent and society.

Nearly every European state has a different system of spreading a certain rudimentary instruction among the masses of the people. All of them differ in principle and in working, from what is done and carried out in the American free States. All of them have in view to provide the people with limited elementary instruction, scarcely sufficient for the practical, or rather the mechanical use of every-day life, rather than to stir up, to stimulate the intellect, to develop and make it susceptible of a higher impulse. The tuition in the European primary schools, generally ends with teaching to read and write, and the first rules of arithmetic, but there does not exist, as in the American townships and villages, an uninterrupted

and closely connected or ascending chain of general instruction. Europe has cared little to possess enlightened

masses.

When, after the terrible tempest which marked the commencement of the middle ages, some of the European nations began toilsomely to dispel the darkness which enveloped them, the most rudimental instruction was limited to a comparatively few. The difficulties to be overcome were numerous, and for various reasons instruction was inaccessible to the mass, and thus limited to a class of the nation or of single communities. Public instruction preserved for centuries this character of exclusiveness or limitations, and even yet has not wholly thrown it off. General and higher information or intellectual education is still beyond the reach of the masses, even in states prominent for their educational establishments, as are Prussia and some other parts of Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Greece. Various reasons contribute to make the access to them difficult, if not wholly impossible. In old times the children of the lower classes, of the peasantry and laborers, often only by accident received primary instruction from a parish priest, or from a monk. And out of such accidents there emerged a Luther, a Keppler, and several of those names immortal in the records of human progress. But the mass remained in ignoIn modern times poverty, often indifference, prevents the immense majority of the lower classes in Europe, from resorting to educational establishments, from which they are no longer excluded by social or political limitations.

rance.

The cardinal hinderance, however, in Europe, proceeds from what so distinctly and in the original source and germ separates the two social organisms. In Europe the education of the people is the task of governments acting

from above; in America the people cares itself for it, and has the whole subject in its bands. The educational system in the American public common schools, is the highest triumph of democracy and of self-government. The European nations expect every thing to be done by their governments, and are satisfied with crumbs thrown to them. The English nation, enjoying self-government in several minor combinations, does not understand how to derive therefrom this self-improving energy, so strongly inborn among the Americans. The English people has not raised itself to the elevated condition of bringing within the reach of the masses a thorough elementary education. If the English do not expect, as the nations of the continent, to have the work done by the government, they look to the patronage, to the stimulus from the powerful and influential landed aristocracy, and as often to that of the church. The example of America stirs up England. Scotland, although covered with primary schools, has nothing which can compare with the common schools of this country. All over Europe the tuition succeeding to the first rudiments, can only be acquired in superior schools, located in larger boroughs and cities, and supplied there by the government. Thus the access to them is almost impossible to the children of poor laborers, of agriculturists, to the immense majority of the peasantry. An American town or village corresponding to an European borough, has several primary schools, and generally one of a second degree, and then a high school, within the reach of all the inhabitants of the township, where the children of both sexes can successively acquire a certain store of various general information, by which they can be fairly piloted through after life. Among the immense majority of the European masses, a kind of mental collapse follows the sparse instruction received in the village

The inhabitants of

pay their schools,

or some other primary school. The freeman of America, even in the most humble worldly condition, is accompanied generally through life by the thirst for spreading and increasing the information once acquired in the schools of his village or town. As the ancient medieval cities and boroughs were studded with turrets and gates, so the American town or village is surrounded with common school-houses, over which towers the high school, at the side of private establishments for education. For the same amount of population, the proportion between the facilities existing here for the use of the people, and a European country enjoying even the best educational system, can be fairly put as four to one. the American township create, vote and and increase their number, when the European centralization-it can be said-only niggardly supplies the like wants of the people. An American community of twentyfive hundred or three thousand inhabitants spends cheerfully three thousand dollars to pay the expenses, and the salary of the teachers of its schools; a corresponding sum is scarcely bestowed on the same object by a European government, in cities with from ten to fifteen thousand inhabitants. The school fund in the like American villages, absorbs about one-third of the communal taxes and expenditures, and this item leads the van in the communal budget; in that of European governments it is generally at the end of all the others. Large cities here devote larger sums to educational purposes, than do whole provinces of the most civilized character in Europe. The whole money spent yearly for schools, academies, colleges in the United States will almost surpass what all the European governments, put together, devote to the same object, the population of Europe being more than tenfold greater than that of the American Commonwealth.