206 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



your club firmly possesses this faith, and sneers 

 sublimely at all who reject it. But if we could 

 transport one of these easy cynics to a tropical 

 town, if we could set him to work all day at an 

 office, aDd in the evening drive him out, high- 

 stepping horses, footman, and all, through a row 

 of wretched mud-hovels, into a brown, and burnt- 

 up plain, with no green grass to delight the eye, 

 no signs of human prosperity to gladden the sym- 

 pathetic heart ; if we could take him back again 

 to a bookless house, and turn him out alone upon 

 the veranda to smoke his solitary weed, unsol- 

 aced by the Saturday or the Globe ; if we could 

 keep him for twelve months in this purpose- 

 less life, without music, art, science, congenial 

 talk — even though cynical — if we could do all 

 this, believe me, our friend would return to his 

 club at last, a gladder and a wiser man, ready to 

 own that the Academy and the Royal Society 

 have their advantages, that South Kensington 

 and the British Museum are something other 

 than an egregious bore, and that the power to 

 take a country -walk over the green, rolling downs, 

 commanding a view into some pleasant English 

 combe, with its Norman church-tower, and its 

 Elizabethan manor-house, forms just as appre- 

 ciable an element in his happiness as the addi- 

 tion of an extra hundred to his income or his 

 salary. These are the things which we miss in 

 the tropics, and for which no adventitious advan- 

 tages of mere money-payment can ever compen- 



sate us. The years spent between those self- 

 same imaginary parallels on our terrestrial globe 

 I count as just so much dead loss of time cut 

 away from one's allotted span. 



And now, as the preachers say — I feel as 

 though I had been gradually dropping into the 

 didactic strain of a sermon — I have done my best 

 to expose, so far as in me lay, the true nature of 

 the Great Tropical Fallacy. I may, perhaps, have 

 drawn my picture rather too grimly from the 

 other side, but, where an exaggerated view pre- 

 vails, exaggeration in the opposite direction can 

 alone redress the balance of truth. It is useless 

 to fight a popular belief with gentle language ; 

 a good, hearty denunciation is needed to impress 

 the speaker's conviction. Besides, in the case of 

 the tropics, I feel strongly on personal grounds. 

 I have myself been deceived and played upon ; I 

 have read the late Canon Kingsley's rhapsodies, 

 and marveled over the exquisite word-painting 

 of Bernardin de St. Pierre. But now I come out 

 like the countryman at the fair, who pays his 

 penny to behold the Wonderful Sea-Serpent, and 

 is introduced to a tame seal in a tub of water. 

 Under such circumstances, some countrymen and 

 some wayfarers, for very shame, keep up the 

 wicked delusion, lest by-standers should mock at 

 their credulity ; but, for my part, I prefer to take 

 my stand at the door of the tent, and warn all 

 and sundry that this tropical show is a gigantic 

 and unconscionable sham. — Bdgravia. 



IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. 



By R. W. DALE. 

 III. — Popular Education. 



THE common school is one of the most char- 

 acteristic of American institutions. It ex- 

 isted in the New England States long before the 

 colonies were separated from the mother-country, 

 and it has survived the separation. The Pilgrim 

 Fathers — as they are reverentially and affection- 

 ately called — had left behind them in England 

 grammar-schools which had been endowed out of 

 the estates of the Church by the wise policy of 

 Edward VI. and Elizabeth, or which commemo- 

 rated the pious liberality of rich merchants, great 

 nobles, and learned bishops. They determined 

 to create schools for themselves — schools that 

 should be supported by taxation levied on every 



citizen, and that should be under the control of 

 the citizens " in town's meeting assembled." 

 Twenty-two years after that terrible winter which 

 followed the landing of the pilgrims from the 

 Mayflower, an act was passed by the General 

 Court of the " old colony " requiring the " select- 

 men " of every township " to have a vigilant eye 

 over their brethren and neighbors, and to see 

 that none of them shall suffer so much barbarism 

 in any of their families as not to endeavor to 

 teach, by themselves or others, their children and 

 apprentices so much learning as may enable them 

 perfectly to read the English tongue, and obtain 

 a knowledge of the capital laws, upon the penalty 



