the mother of the gods, with that of the Virgin Mary. "El Gorro" Hidalgo thus veiled his intentions and obtained a large following, which he attempted to instruct in the ideas of freedom. Of course he failed; pitch-forks and clubs were no match for Spanish sabers and guns; and ideas are not assimilated by a people in a day or a year. But some of the seed sown fell on good ground and bore fruit. Even the military struggle did not entirely cease during the ten years between 1811 when Hidalgo met his death, and 1821, when the independence of Mexico was finally obtained by the revolt against the rule of the Spanish Cortes, headed by Iturbide, "the Liberator."

This second revolution was entirely different in its character and motive from the first. That of 1810 was a revolt of the common people against personal wrongs, with the idea of establishing the principle of equal privileges and responsibilities for all in the government. That of 1821 was a revolt of the state to obtain freedom from the domination of a foreign state, with no thought of changing the principle underlying the form of gov

ernment.

A regency was established with Iturbide at the head, and of which O'Donoju, the last Spanish viceroy, was a member; the intention being to form a monarchy under one of the princes of the royal family of Spain. When that honor was declined the crown was offered to Jerome Bonaparte, the ex-King of Spain, against whom Hidalgo had declared his revolution to have been directed, and was again refused. Iturbide now saw the opportunity for personal aggrandizement, and, being a native prince, he persuaded the army to proclaim him emperor in 1822. But this did not accord with the pride of the creole and Spanish residents, who were only willing to bow to the claims of European royal blood to govern by di vine right, though it might satisfy the church authorities as embodying the same principle; consequently, Iturbide was compelled to abdicate and a provisional government was again established

in 1823.

In the meantime the republican idea promulgated by Hidalgo had found favor among those not closely connected with the church or with Spain, in the more

enlightened sections of the country, where through trade and other channels intercourse was had with American and English people, and this standard was again set up at Vera Cruz in December, 1822, under the leadership of the young Santa Anna.

The situation at this time is very interesting to the student of human progress. The representatives of the ideas of the past century, through their bigotry in refusing to accept the constitutional revolution in Spain, had thrown off the yoke of foreign control and thus freed the limbs of the young nation, anxious to realize the ideas of the new century. The old ideas were without a leader, the new ideas were marshaling under a young leader, patriotic, though ambitious. But it was not yet time for the struggle to begin openly. Compromise was necessary to the old to enable it to change front and meet the new, and so the first liberal constitution was adopted in 1824 with Victoria, an independent, as president, and Nicolas Bravo, a member of the conservative or church party, as vice-president.

The constitution was modeled after that of the United States-the federation of Mexico being made up of nineteen states and five territories. The adoption of so liberal a form of government was certainly premature because of the ignorance of the majority of the people, and the great power held over them by the church, both spiritually, as controlling all educational effort, and temporally, as the owner of at least one-third of the lands of the country; and there is little doubt that the church party expected to and did control the elections in their interest. Under such a condition of affairs an appeal to arms was the only resource of the liberal party, and yet they were not the first to make that appeal. The church party, conscious of their strength, would not wait for the expiration of Victoria's term of office, and attempted to overthrow him by a revolution led by Bravo, the vice-president, in 1827. But he was defeated by Guerrero, and the next eight or nine years were spent in the struggle between the two parties, in which the church party, led by Pedraza and Bustamantine, was successful at the polls, and the popular party, under Guerrero and Santa Anna, generally suc

cessful in the field. Guerrero was of Indian blood, and one of those who had continued, through all these years, the popular struggle begun by Hidalgo, and, like his teacher, his ideas of government would have been grand could the passions of greed and ambition have been elim

inated. He believed that the people should be left untrammeled by restrictions on their labor or freedom, the powers of government being mainly for prevention of crime and general paternal direction. He was seized and executed by the church party in 1831.

I suppose the Lord knows why it is that the good and the bad are let grow side by side in this world, so that whereever you find one of them the other is sure to be close at hand; and if He would only explain this phenomenon, we should then know just how it happens that there are county institutes and county institutes, all the way from those. that are away up in G," as I heard a teacher say the other day, to those that are not worth ten cents a gross in fifty-five cent silver," as another brother (or was it a sister?) remarked in my presence not long ago, when trying to find some term near enough the zero point to express his or her estimate of the value of a certain teacher who couldn't teach. But whatever the reason for all this may be, the fact is, that when one walks abroad among county institutes, even for a single summer, he sees such exhibitions of the good and the bad, such combinations of the just and the unjust as to make him marvel at the possibilities in the premises at either end of the line.

A score of times in the last two months I have wished I could be a kodak, for the time being, so that I might snapshot some of the institutes I have attended, and afterwards have the plates developed for the readers of THE JOURNAL; but, like the ghost in Hamlet, something has said to me that such eternal blazon must not be to the eyes of flesh and blood, and as all the eyes I know of are constructed on that basis, I must content myself, as did the poor specter in the tragedy, by saying only "List! List! O List!"

Can anybody tell me why, in a Christian country and in times of peace, when the thermometer is 98° in the shade, a *Copyright by Wm. Hawley Smith, 1893.

quiet and law-abiding company of noncombatant and inoffensive young men and women, mostly from the country, should be arranged in squads, and pla toons, and divisions, and bastions, and breastworks, and chevaux de frise, or words to that effect--and to the music of the wry-necked fife and boisterous drum, that make day hideous in the upstairs hall of the school house, they should be marched about and in and out of the recitation rooms like the figures in a St. Peter clock, or the automatons at Mrs. Jarley's? I am sure it is right that all things should be done decently and in order, but when I saw such military display as I have noted above, clamped on to a very clever lot of young men and women, in institute assembled, the other day, somehow I didn't like it. I saw these same young folks, when the "exercises" of the day were over, moving about, from room to room, in a quiet, orderly, and natural manner; and I couldn't help wondering why they should not have been permitted to do the same thingtaught to do just that same thing, if need be rather than have been marched about like soldiers.

No, no! We don't want to make soldiers of our boys and girls. We want to make them men and women,-just plain, free, and sensible men and women, that's all; graceful because they are natural, and obedient to the divine principle to keep out of one another's way by the use of their own wits, rather than according to orders issued from "headquarters," while the band plays!

The greatest general of recent years said, a good while ago, "The war is over!"

I wonder what has gone wrong with

tAuthor of Evolution of Dodd.

the first personal pronoun, singular number, nominative case, that it is no longer "good form" for a teacher to use it as pertaining to herself when talking to her class about the illustrious personage who is hearing the then-on recitation? And yet I recently heard the following from a newly-minted schoolma'am, freshly imported from an eastern teacher-factory, and with the tool-marks of her makers all over her, so that there could be no mistake about the brand, as who should say, "Examine the label, which bears our signature, and without which none can be genuine!"

This young lady (and a very clever girl she was, too, after you got down through the triple plate of formality that her "training" had covered her over with) had a class of little folks that she was working, to show us how to do it. And here is a part of what she did with that class, anent the use of that least, and yet greatest of all words, the first personal pronoun, aforesaid:

"Now children," she smilingly declaimed, "look right at Miss Twiddledum (herself) for Miss Twiddledum is going to give you an exercise that will be so cute and funny! Now all do just as Miss Twiddledum does. That is very nice. Oh, you are so smart! Now see Miss Twiddledum do this! Isn't that funny? Now see if you can do what Miss Twiddledum did. Careful now -just as Miss Twiddledum did! Oh, no, that is not the way Miss Twiddledum did at all! Now look at Miss Twiddledum again! See how Miss Twiddledum does?

Look sharp! Now just as Miss Twiddledum does!" And so following, for a quarter of an hour by the stolid-faced clock, which gazed at the entire performance without either smile or frown, though its was the only countenance in the room that came so happily through the trying ordeal. I remember that it used to be said that President Andrew Johnson's printed messages and speeches looked like a post-and-board fence with the boards knocked off, so frequently did he use the word "I," but even such diction seems to me preferable to the untra "Cæsar-led-his-army" style of this latest disciple of third-personalism.

And yet double prices are paid for this sort of thing, well rubbed in, by some county institutes that I have seen!

I wader if any one knows just what parts of the cerebrum and cerebellum of a six-year-old child are illuminated and made to glow with an arc light brilliancy when the lucid statement is made to the little him or her that "the fishbone sound, followed by the little lamb sound, followed by grandpa's watch sound form the vocalized expression of the word cat!" It takes three prices, and a "special importation of our own brand" of teachers to get such instruction as that just quoted into a county institute. And yet, though it comes high, I have found those who have had to have it, and who have had it once! Curious world we live in, and curious folks who live in it!

But I wish you could have seen, at another institute, that motherly little woman that we all sat entranced before, for half an hour, while she taught a second reader class of boys and girls how to read. Like Riley's "Old Fashioned Roses "There wan't no style about her," and yet she held her class, and the fifty of us who were "observing," for thirty minutes, so that we all wondered where in the world the time had gone to. Tell you how she did it? Ask me to tell you how the sun shines, or roses bloom, or brooks flow! Method? None, and all of them! How can that be? Well, it was, and would be again, and always will be, in the hands of a teacher who knows how to teach, as she did. That is a mystery, I grant; but it is as divine as it is mysterious. Most divine things are mysterious—that is, they are so to a good many people, especially the matterof-fact, cold-blooded, and mathematically logical people. This little woman was neither cold-blooded nor mathematically logical. She loved her children (not in any gushing and demonstratively-sentimental way, but with real, honest, homemade mother love), and she had the tact and gumption to keep her children at work on a quite difficult lesson, for half an hour, by which time they had mastered it so that they could read it well, and understood what it meant. And that seems to me to be teaching! And for a whole roomful of country teachers to sit by and "observe" such work as that, seems to me to be a good thing. Such work makes an institute what it ought to be, and what, thank heaven, it sometimes is. You have seen the like, haven't you? Per

haps you can do such work. If you can, may a kind providence grant you a long life and good pay, for you richly deserve both..

But there are two more general characteristics of county institutes that I want to speak of, that I am sure ought to be considerably changed from their present status. And the first of these is the kind of class-room work that is done at these teachers' meetings. In nearly every one of these gatherings that I have attended in the last two months there have been regular classes formed in all the branches of study in which examination for a certificate is required, and most of the time is spent in refreshing the memories of the teachers on once-knownbut-now-forgotten facts pertaining to these studies. The to-be teachers become pupils, and some "professor" "coaches them for exams." as the college boys would say. All of which, or at least most of which, seems to me to be far short of what ought to be done at a county institute. It should be to gain strength and skill as teachers, and not to re-grub dead facts from their forgotten tombs in once-familiar books, that our teachers should be forced to come together in hot weather and work till they sweat like harvest hands.

And the best way in the world that I know of to accomplish such an end-the only way that I believe teachers can gain strength and skill as teachers, is to have them teach! And to this end I have seen two experiments tried this season, which, while they were neither of them all that might be desired or hoped for (what is there in this world that is all that might be desired or hoped for ?), still they were moves in the right direction and were by far the most interesting things that I have seen, in this line, for years. The first experiment was as follows:

The institute in question held a fourweeks' session, five days in each weekthat is, it had twenty sessions.

Each day during the session the county superintendent prepared sets of tickets, twenty tickets in each set, and had the members draw these tickets at random from a ticket-box that was passed about the room at each daily general session. For instance, there were twenty tickets marked A.; twenty more, marked B.,

and so on, in sets of twenty, till there were enough tickets to give each member one ticket.

By the drawing of these tickets at random from the box the institute was divided into classes of about twenty each (of course there were some odd ones, every day, for the attendance was not always in multiples of twenty, but that cut no figure in the working of the plan), and as a new drawing was made each day, of course the classes thus formed were never twice alike!

As soon as a drawing was made all the members who had drawn "A" tickets were sent to a room by themselves.

Those who held "B" tickets went to another room, and so on, till each class was closeted by itself.

Once by themselves, each class cast lots to determine who of the number should teach the class at a recitation to be held the following day, the remaining members to be pupils in the class.

Each teacher upon whom the lot fell had the privilege of selecting the subject for, and determining the scope of, the coming recitation; but each one was held strictly responsible, by the county superintendent, for the conduct of his or her particular recitation, and for the outcome of the same.

The recitations thus arranged for were each about half an hour long, and together they occupied half the time of the institute, daily, some two or more recitations being in progress at the same time; and those who were not members of the then reciting classes were observers of what was going on.

If, as the days went on, and new classes were formed, and lots were cast for teachers, the lot fell upon any member who had once been through the ordeal, a new lot was cast, so that no member had to officiate twice-any how, not until every member had served at least once.

Now, as I have said, this plan is not without its faults, and in its practical workings it ranged all the way from the sublime to the grotesquely ridiculous, from the exceedingly funny to the pathetic and almost tragic; but as a matter of fact, it did more for the young people who were part and parcel of it than anything I have seen done in an institute for many a long day. And, above all things,

it did this-it gave the county superintendent some reliable data on which to base his opinion as to the fitness of applicants to teach. In the case in quesIn the case in question, the superintendent told me that he counted the work done by teachers in these test classes one-half in determining their grade as teachers, and I am sure it was worthy at least that much promi

nence.

And I wish you could have been an "observer" at some of these classes! You would have seen human nature in the school-room as one rarely gets a chance to see it. I could write for hours, descriptions of the teachers and teaching that I saw in this way. There was the bashful girl (poor thing) who could hardly say her soul was her own, but who knew that her place for the next year, perhaps, was in the balance, and that it would come or go according as she failed or succeeded in the half-hour before her. And to see her rally all her powers, and hold her timid self well to the front by the sheer force of will-men have charged into cannon-mouths with less exercise of self-control than this girl exhibited!

And there was the blasé old-timer, who has for years been able to talk off even the strong arm of the law, and get a certificate anyhow because he could use words he was forced to take his innings and let us see just what he could do. And we saw! He spent his half-hour telling how he would do it, but he did nothing. And so the superintendent had the blessed privilege of, and good reason for, putting that garrulous old head in a basket, where it ought to have gone years ago.

But I must not stop to tell the whole story. To use the vernacular, "it was better than a circus." But it was sensible, and it did the work. It demonstrated whether or not those who claimed to be teachers could really teach, and that is what these institutes are for, (If they are not for that, what are they for?) and I should like to see more of the same sort. It comes nearer to being life, as it actually is in the school-room, than anything else I have met with. Amongst those who were pupils for the time being there were all the shades of character that one finds in every day school work. There were mean pupils, stupid pupils, contrary pupils, argu

mentative pupils, smart pupils, and so on, with a few really good pupils sprinkled in (which I think providence provides, so that we need not entirely lose heart) and the teacher in charge had to make the best of it all, just as he or she always has to do in the regular work of professional life.

Suppose you try this plan, some time. If you do, be prepared to turn pale, and to suffer from sinking of the heart at the sights you will see. But you ought to see such sights! You ought to know what teaching, just what teaching the children of this country have to put up with. And this plan will show it to you. It will also show you some work that will cheer your heart, as well as possibly make you ashamed of yourself, as you are led to see how your very best is far exceeded by some quiet teacher whom you have never thought of as beyond the ordinary. But even such an experience is wholesome. The plan, as a whole, is a most excellent one, and the county superintendent who devised it not only deserves honorable mention," but he ought to have a "gold medal" from the World's Fair.

He

The other plan that I spoke of is much simpler, and while it has "points," yet it is not nearly as effective as the one I have just detailed. In this case the county superintendent would, every day, go out through the town where the institute was held and gather up a class of, say half a dozen boys and girls, and bring them to the school-house. would take these children to a room by themselves, and there have them meet, in his presence only, some member of the institute, who, as a teacher organizing a school, would examine them orally, and determine what they were fit to do in the line of school work. Or, again, he would make a class of these pupils, and have his teachers, one by one, come in and teach it for a few minutes, as best they could, while he looked on.

This plan was also somewhat crude, and when I saw it in operation it had only been running a day or two, so that, as we would say in the shop, it "ran a little rough;" but it was aimed the right way, and the superintendent writes me that it was an "eye-opener" to all parties concerned. Like the other plan, its

purpose is to discover whether or not