mineral wealth, moulder away on the banks of great rivers. Their streets were once thronged with buyers and sellers, the hearts of the citizens were full of hope and courage, projects of enterprise and improvement were in the air. All this life has vanished, and gloom and dejection brood everywhere. The principal factor in this dilapidation has been the railroad, upon which they built all their hopes, but which has made it practically impossible to do business except at terminal points.

Mr. George W. Parker, vice-president and general manager of the St. Louis & Cairo Short Line, testified before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, in 1885, as to the necessities and the conditions of through and local freight rates on his line between St. Louis and Cairo. The following excerpt from his testimony will be of interest as representing the views of a gentleman thoroughly well informed, and certainly not hostile to the railroads :

so as to get them to the points where the demands of trade require them without pulling them empty. Very frequently, also, it occurs where this contest between trade centres comes in. My own line is occasionally used by its patrons as an instrument of warfare to protect their territory and their business. are dependent upon St. Louis for a large share of our patronage, and we must join the army and fight when war is declared.

"The Chairman. What do you mean by your patrons? The patrons along the line, inland?

"Mr. Parker. No, sir; not so much as I mean my patrons at the terminal points. It sometimes happens —

I wish it were more seldom - that a combination of circumstances arises, by which, in order to protect our patrons here, we are compelled to accept a shipment from them at less, perhaps, than it would cost us to do that particular service."

When it is considered that in the State of Iowa, for instance, the local business constitutes only about twenty per cent, and the through business about eighty per cent of the total, and the losses on the four-fifths traffic must be made up by overburdening the one-fifth,

"The Chairman. Do you carry freight from St. Louis to Cairo, or from Cairo to St. Louis, at less than it costs you to run the trains or to pay the current expenses of those trains?

"Mr. Parker. Yes, sir; sometimes we carry through freight at less than the expense of performing the service. I shall have to answer in the affirmative, though we do as little of this as possible. Circumstances force us to work for nothing, occasionally.

"The Chairman. Does that help you, or help anybody else any, except the man who owns the freight?

"Mr. Parker. Yes, sir; it frequently helps us in the distribution of our cars,

effect on the business of the small places, and how slender must be their chance when the industrial war is on, and the mighty influence of the railways is thrown wholly on the side of the big cities.

A glance at the census figures shows that some kind of blight has fallen upon the country districts, from which the cities have been exempt. The astounding growth in the population of the cities has been in great measure directly at the expense of the rural communities. While the city of Indianapolis increased 32,389 between 1880 and 1890, or fortythree per cent, forty-nine counties in the State remained practically stationary, and twenty-one counties actually lost

population, some of them quite heavily. It is absurd to imagine that there was in 1880 any surplus population in those twenty-one counties; the mere natural excess of births over deaths should have added materially to their numbers. This exodus has not been peculiar to Indiana. Twenty counties in Michigan, between 1884 and 1890, exhibited the same decline, while Detroit, the principal terminal point in the State, showed a steady and rapid advance. It is not difficult to see whence came the hundreds of thousands who have poured into New York and Chicago during the last decade. The map of Michigan illustrates in a striking way the wasting effects of railway discrimination against the rural districts. Of the twenty counties which actually retrograded during the period mentioned, nearly all lie in the southern portion of the State, and Cass, St. Joseph, Branch, Hillsdale, Lenawee, and Monroe constitute one black streak of decaying communities from Detroit to Chicago. It cannot be doubted that the railroads have been the most potent factor in the economic life of the people of these counties. What is it in railroad management which has laid such a heavy hand upon them?

It is not, of course, fancied that the inequality of railroad facilities is the only force driving people cityward. Ambition, the monotony of rural life, the fascinations of the city, the American spirit of restlessness and desire for change, the cheapness and universality of travel, -all these impel the farmer's boy to leave the farm for the village, and the village boy to long for the metropolis. These tendencies are in the air, in the conditions of the times, and in the character of the people; and when to all these we add that every enterprising village tradesman finds himself handicapped by high railroad rates, and trampled upon in every railroad war, and if he is really ambitious soon transfers his business to a large city, and that in every small town

there is literally no opening for young men, and no alternative but to go away, it is manifest that the railroads are greatly aiding the cities in drawing to themselves the best and the worst from the country, and every moment are increasing the magnitude of the municipal problem, which is already one of the most alarming and formidable questions that confront us.

This process has been steadily building up great cities to be the menace of free institutions; the confluence not only of wealth and business, but of pauperism and misery, of political rottenness and industrial slavery. Here labor toils in great prison-pens, and lodges in tenements reeking with disease; here the enemies of society gather, and in the midst of filth and hunger plant seeds of anarchy; here poverty breeds crime, and crime poverty. The mighty centripetal force has sucked into this maelstrom millions of human lives that are daily growing more wretched and helpless. Every neighboring village sends its delegation of exiles, the defeated and broken down, to swell the wretchedness of New York, where one in ten of all the funerals is said to go to the potter's field.

People have been so long accustomed to "point with pride" to the wonderful growth of our cities that they have failed to note sufficiently the cost at which it has been effected; at most they have regarded it as an inevitable tendency of the times, analogous to the centralization so manifest everywhere. That it is very largely the result of an universal denial of equal transportation privileges; a gross injustice to thousands of isolated communities; a wrong which, if perpetrated by government, would lead to revolution, has been too often overlooked. The refusal of simple justice to a thousand villages in a matter vitally affecting their every interest is the charge now laid at the door of the railroad system. That this injustice has aided the growth

and wealth of fifty cities is not an admissible answer.

The part the railroads play in the rush of population to the cities is well worth serious investigation. The problem of our cities is urgent. The control of our largest cities seems to have passed definitely into the hands of their worst citizens. Occasionally things become intolerably bad, and then the better elements combine, and a temporary improvement is effected; but the deep and muddy stream of immigration pours in from Europe; the suction from the country, drawing good and bad alike, continues unabated; and in a year or two a new voting population has come in which has to be educated. The vicious principle of allowing partisan politics to govern in municipal affairs throws the reins once more into the hands of the bosses, and the old shameful round begins again.

The rural districts and the small towns still hold three fourths of the votes, but they do not hold one fourth of the power. The vote of New York city determines nearly every national election. Still, if the small towns and the country could see that the present policy of railway discrimination is powerfully contributing to the influences that are concentrating the national life in the great cities, and immeasurably adding to the burdens of business in every rural community, it is possible that an awakened public opinion would demand such changes in the laws and in the railway practices as would give every locality an equal chance. The home, which is to the workingman of New York as unattainable as a throne, would be possible in a village. The small independent workshop, granted the same access to the public highway as the great factory, would struggle up into life and activity; the industrial population, finding it possible to obtain work elsewhere than in crowded cities, would build up thousands of thriving villages, and the hum of busy

and contented toil would fill the streets of towns that are now deserted.

The evils of discrimination are no new thing. They have occupied the attention of Congress and the state legislatures for many years. The existence of the evils cannot be denied. How to remove them is the great problem. Some twenty States, as well as the general government, have tried to control them by means of commissions. They have all undoubtedly done some good; but the States are, by the Constitution, expressly shut out from interfering with interstate commerce, and the larger part of the evils felt have pertained to commerce crossing state lines. The railroads of the country made a grand pretense of trying to prevent the passage of the Interstate Commerce Law and the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission; but these few years have been abundantly sufficient to prove that the law was a railroad measure, the chief effect of which has been to enable the railroads partially to suppress the great abuse of free passes, to collect an important body of informa tion, and to attract the attention of many students to this gigantic and difficult problem. The hope of making the commission anything more than a bureau of statistics seems very faint. The law has doubtless been of benefit in securing some publicity of rates, but the inveterate evils of discrimination, especially against localities, remain untouched. As long as freight agents are full of zeal and enterprise, through freight will be captured at whatever it will pay, local traffic will have to pay for itself and through traffic also, and village communities will have the breath of life squeezed out of them in a hopeless struggle with terminal competitors. Both the managers and their critics seem to be coming rapidly to the conclusion that only by operating the railroads as a single organic whole will these evils ever be removed. The railroads have long contended that competition makes discrimination unavoidable;

experience appears to be showing every day more conclusively that this is true, and at the same time proving that competitive private ownership means combination alternating with war, accompanied by discriminations, personal and local, of

every kind, uncontrollable and destructive, or else a coalition so gigantic and so omnipotent as to hold all the industries of the nation in its grasp. The alternative is nationalization or a universal pool.

Henry J. Fletcher.

It would seem strange to hear any reasonably well-informed man of our time assert that teachers cannot be aided in their work by special training; and yet it has not been so long since the most intelligent and observing men have come to hold this opinion. Not so many years ago, an English schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster, first promulgated the then unheard-of doctrine that teaching, like the practice of medicine or law, was an art that could be acquired and perfected by familiarizing one's self with the peculiar conditions and characteristics which distinguish it from other arts. In our own country, the stormy times during the first years of the normal school illustrate the notion, then prevalent, that skillfulness in teaching depends upon a sort of instinct which will show itself at the appropriate time, without any special attention being paid to it. It seems that our early forefathers held stoutly to this, for the first note in favor of special training for teachers in the colonies was sounded in the Massachusetts Magazine for June, 1789, by one supposed to be Elisha Ticknor; but it was not until a number of years afterward, about 1824, that a school was established whose avowed purpose it was to train teachers. This school was opened at Concord, Vt., by Samuel R. Hall, who, a little later, published the Lectures on Teaching, which constituted the only book literature on this subject for a number of years, and which was very widely circu

lated among the teachers of the country. Another school for the training of teachers was opened at Lancaster, Mass., in 1827, by James G. Carter, sometimes called the "father of the normal school; but it was not until Horace Mann took charge of school matters in Massachusetts that the normal school idea took substantial root in the school system of our country. By his efforts three normal schools were opened in Massachusetts, about 1840: one at Lexington, one at Barré, and one at Westfield, with "Father Pierce," Samuel J. May, and C. B. Tillinghast, respectively, as principals; and although a very vigorous attack was made on these schools by the legislature of Massachusetts in 1840, still they are all in existence at the present time; the location of the schools at Lexington and Barré, however, having been changed several times, until they are now permanently situated at Framingham and Bridgewater.

The report of the committee appointed by the legislature of Massachusetts to investigate the work of these new institutions is very interesting, as showing what the law-makers of that period thought about the art of teaching and the way it is acquired. "Academies and high schools," they said, "cost the Commonwealth nothing; and they are fully competent, in the opinion of the committee, to furnish a competent supply of teachers. . . . It appears to your committee that every person who has

himself undergone the process of instruction must acquire by that very process the art of instructing others." But these were not the opinions of the most eminent men of that period, for at the opening of the first normal school at Lexington President John Quincy Adams said: "We see monarchs expending vast sums establishing normal schools throughout their realms, and sparing no pains to convey knowledge and efficiency to all the children of their poorest subjects. ... Shall monarchies steal a march on republics in the patronage of that education on which a republic is based?" And Daniel Webster said on the same occasion: "This plan of a normal school for Plymouth County is designed to elevate our common schools, and thus carry out the noble idea of our Pilgrim Fathers. . . . Now, if normal schools are to teach teachers, they enlist this interest on the right side; they make parents and all who [in] any way influence childhood competent for their high office."

The normal school idea had become too firmly implanted in the minds of those familiar with educational needs to be uprooted by the hostile report of a committee, and so the founding of normal schools, public and private, pushed forward, although with some opposition, in all parts of our country. It was not, however, until the normal school at Oswego, N. Y., had been in operation for several years that the American public agreed that this sort of school had a rightful and useful place in our system of education, if indeed it can truly be said that our people have even yet become thoroughly convinced of this. True it is, at any rate, that people interested practically in educational work flocked. to Oswego from all parts of the country to witness the wonders to be seen there; and they generally went home to establish normal schools in the States and cities from which they came, until at the present time there are upwards of one hundred and thirty-five public normal

schools, and many others under private control; and in many States, as Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Kentucky, where normal schools have long been in existence, there is a constant demand being made for the establishment of others. Nor is this all, for chairs and departments of pedagogy have been founded in many colleges and universities, and several normal and teachers' colleges have been opened in different parts of the land.

In the foundation of teachers' seminaries and normal schools, both in this country and abroad, one main purpose has been kept in view; and that is the training of teachers for the common schools, such as are usually supported in whole or in part at public expense. It is a very natural inference that if the State supports a certain grade of schools, and compels attendance upon them, it should go further, and provide competent teachers for them; and this is what the public normal school system of this and other countries is expected to do. It is a well-known fact, however, that a large percentage of the common schools of our country do not get their teachers in any considerable numbers from the normal schools; yet it is these schools that the State is chiefly interested in, and that it maintains, free of expense, for the benefit of all its citizens. But at present the State not only supports elementary instruction in the common schools; it also aids secondary education by its substantial encouragement in a financial way of the public high school system; and it naturally follows that if the State gives aid to secondary education, it should be anxious, or at least it should not object, to have its contributions made good use of in the high school by the employment of good teachers, such as the normal school is expected to produce. This leaves the normal school free to fit teachers for the secondary as well as the elementary schools; or rather, it gives normal school graduates liberty, and even