Bolingbroke liked to have Swift visit them; Pope begged him to "give all to the poor, and come to die with" him; the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury warmly seconded Gay's urgent invitation to him to make them a long visit. One or two instances of what appears at this distance to be ill-breeding prove nothing against the evidence of such invitations as Swift was constantly receiving from gentlemen and ladies. Had he been content with the position of a court jester, it might be said that he was asked to dinner to entertain the other guests; but he came as an equal or not at all. A few splenetic expressions, many of them owing to disease, cannot outweigh the testimony to his good-nature of such witnesses as Addison, Bolingbroke, and Lady Betty Germaine. If he hated mankind, it was with the hate of a reformer. Like Martin Luther, he did his best work when angry; like Dante, he

"Loved well because he hated,

Hated wickedness that hinders loving."

Abuse the race as he would, he could not help working for it. It was while he was engaged in the composition of "Gulliver's Travels" that he fought his great battle for Ireland, served as God's almoner for Dublin, and watched over the health of the dying Stella. He cannot be convicted of child-hating by a single expression of impatience at Lady Masham's attendance at the bedside of a sick child, at a critical moment, when her presence with the queen seemed the one thing needful to stop the war. When public affairs were less pressing he had been to see Lady Masham's children, and, long after he used the language referred to, the mother besought his counsel and assistance, and he wrote her a pathetic letter that still moves the reader. When he was turned of seventy, was "emaciated, weak, morose, and prone to sudden fits of passion," says his biographer, Sheridan, " to me his behavior was gentle as it had always been from my early childhood, treating me with partial kindness, as being his godson, often giving me instruction, attended with frequent presents and rewards when I did well. I loved him from my boyish days, and never stood in the least awe before him, as I do not remember ever to have had a cross look or a harsh expression from him."

The more Swift is studied in a kindly spirit, the greater and the better his character will appear. He had faults: he lacked humility, faith that can remove mountains, charity that suffereth long and is kind, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. He was fervent in spirit, but he was not rejoicing in hope, nor always patient in tribulation. He kept the promise of his youth that he would

"On a day make sin and folly bleed,"

but he did not invite to the table spread for the repentant. His love for the sinner was not equal to his hatred of the sin. In his old age he asked Dr. Delany whether "the corruptions and villanies of men did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?" "No." "Why, why, how can you help it? How can you avoid it?" "Because I am commanded, Fret not thyself because of evil-doers.'" That command Swift could not obey. Life was no luxury to him. He read the third chapter of Job on his birthdays; and he inscribed on his tombstone his joy that he was at last going where the wicked cease from troubling and where the weary are at rest, ubi sava indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit.

ADAMS SHERMAN HILL.

ART. V. Report to the Commissioners appointed by her Majesty to inquire into the Education given in Schools in England, not comprised within her Majesty's two recent Commissions, and to the Commissioners appointed by her Majesty to inquire into the Schools in Scotland, on the Common-School System of the United States and of the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. By the REV. JAMES FRASER, M. A., Assistant Commissioner. Presented to both Houses of Parliament, by Command of her Majesty. London. 1867.

In the first year of his administration, when considering the interests of the newly constituted Republic, Washington thus addressed the two Houses of Congress on the subject of National Education: "You will agree with me in opinion

that there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours, it is proportionably essential." The part of education in forming and then in freeing the Colonies, the power it had given of organizing a national government, the confidence it inspired in the institutions just set in operation, brought it into the very foreground of thought and action.

Events not then anticipated, movements not then within the possibility of anticipation, began in time to develop themselves; and as they grew the work which education had to do grew likewise. When immigration, attracted by the prospects of the young nation, set in with a force almost appalling, and while it brought new hands to labor, brought also new brains to inform and new lives to transform, no single institution appeared so capable of bearing the shock as the common school. To this, indeed, it was due that there was no shock, nothing that overthrew, or even suspended, the national progress. To this, at the present hour, we owe the calmness with which we contemplate the daily landing of emigrants, who in their best estate must be put on probation, and in their worst be sent to the almshouse or the penitentiary. A yet greater strain has come in our day with the emancipation of the slave, throwing upon us at once four millions of blacks, to say nothing of some millions of whites whom slavery had debased, millions whom it is a matter of vital importance to train to their proper place within our institutions. To do it we resort instinctively to schools. On them the Freedmen's Bureau spends its best energies; on them the associations and individuals, whose care of the Southern population has given war a new aspect and peace a new object, rely in their wholly unprecedented enterprise; on them the whole nation leans, as upon the best of merely human means, to carry out the purposes which it reverently recognizes as Divine.

The work of the common school is twofold. It takes charge of children, trains them in habits of order, teaches them the use of speech and the pen, together with the elements of NO. 218.

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language and numbers, disciplining the intellect and giving it the power of acquiring knowledge; and here its direct work ceases. Its indirect work is to help the mind to grow out of school as well as in it, enlightening the life, opening its relations with other lives, and revealing the laws above them all. Whatever influences besides its own affect its pupils, whatever they learn from the home, from society, and from the Church, the school is the source from which they draw much, often the greater part, of what they know, and, consequently, of what they are.

The common school, like everything human, is imperfect. Even where it has done, and is still doing, so great a work as is ascribed to it among ourselves, we can see that its work might be still greater. "I would point," says an Ohio representative, "to the schools of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and other cities of the State, if I desired a stranger to see the glory of Ohio. I would point to the thirteen thousand school-houses and the seven hundred thousand pupils in the schools of Ohio." "The returns," says the Ohio School Commissioner, "reveal the humiliating fact that there were six hundred and eighteen townships and special districts in the State in each of which the schools were in session, on an average, less than twentyfour weeks one hundred and twenty days-during the year. But this is not all; three hundred and forty townships sustained their schools less than twenty weeks; two hundred and three less than sixteen weeks; and forty-five less than twelve weeks." The colors of the two pictures need blending to show our schools as they are and as they should be.

The volume whose title stands at the head of this article is one of the most valuable contributions ever made towards the formation of a correct opinion concerning the common schools of the United States. A foreigner's impressions are always worth having, not because they are certain to be right, but because they are almost certain to be different from our own, and therefore to give us a point of comparison to which ours may be referred.

"Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?'

No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself

But by reflection, by some other things.*"

The value of such means to see ourselves and our institutions is greatly enhanced when the foreign critic is, as in the present instance, a man of principle, good-will, and intelligence.

The Rev. James Fraser, Rector of Upton, Reading, is an active clergyman of the English Church. He came to the United States, under an appointment described on his titlepage, in the spring, and went back in the autumn of 1865, spending most of his time in this country, and the rest in Canada. His Report was written within a few months after his return, but not made public for more than a year. It is a blue book of four hundred and thirty pages, of which all but a hundred and twenty relate to the United States, and it is to this portion of the Report that we propose to confine ourselves.

The Report is, throughout, distinguished by its manly and liberal religious tone. It makes no professions, but from first to last its standard is the faith and duty of a Christian. The earnestness of the writer is evident, his sincerity unquestionable.

The kindliness of his spirit is not less manifest. Strong as are his convictions, they are modestly expressed, and with the plain purpose of doing good to all whom they concern. Candor and charitableness dwell in these pages, and draw us towards their author with a personal interest that blue books are not wont to inspire. From judgments so temperate and so considerate as his we ought to derive some benefit, nor can we fail to do so, if we take them up in the same spirit in which they are brought forward.

Mr. Fraser says many pleasant things about us and our schools. "It is no flattery or exaggeration," he remarks, "to say that it [the American people] is, if not the most highly educated, yet certainly the most generally educated and intelligent people on the earth." "I cannot disguise from myself," he confesses, "that the average American, and particularly the average American of the mechanic or laboring class, stands on a vantage-ground, in respect both of knowledge and intelligence, as compared with the average Englishman." † He is much impressed with the national interest in education, especially at such

* Page 203.

† Page 172.