THE STATE AND HIGHER EDUCATION. 705 



upon the character of tlio Aincricaii people without an historical .study 

 of immigratiou and without taking' a census of the populatioUj as to 

 write a History of American Education before obtaining the local 

 facts. 



A great deal of pioneer work in this direction has been done in Bar- 

 nard's American Journal of Education ; in the Annual Reports and Cir- 

 culars of Infornnition published by the United States Bureau of Educa- 

 tion ; in the periodical and educational journals of the country, and in 

 the local histories of particular institutions of learning and of particular 

 systems of schools. A strong and novel impulse in the direction of or- 

 ganized inquiry concerning the history of e ucational institutions in 

 this country was communicated to the country in the centennial year, 

 1870, by General John Eaton, then Commissioner of Education. The 

 spirit of local co-operation was enlisted in many of our American colleges, 

 and considerable historical work was then done. Some of it was locally 

 published, but most of it never saw the light. Popular support and 

 Government appropriations were lacking for the adequate prosecution 

 of the work. One magniticent result however of this new spirit of 

 organized inquiry was the great volume on the public libraries of the 

 United States, their history, condition, and management, published in 

 1876, by the Department of the Interior for the Bureau of Education. 

 A single contribution to the history of education, edited by Dr. Frank- 

 lin B. Hough, was published by the Bureau in 1883. It was a pamphlet 

 of 7'2 pages, called Historical Sketches of the Universities and Colleges 

 of the United States, and related to the University of Missouri. 



The idea of systematically investigating the history of higher educa- 

 tion in this country was revived anew in connection with an inquiry un- 

 dertaken by the speaker, at the instance of General John Eaton, con- 

 cerning The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities. 

 Although concerned primarily with the history of a single department 

 of instruction in a few representative colleges, like Harvard, Yale, Co- 

 lumbia, Cornell, the University of Michigan, and the Johns Hopkins Uni- 

 versity, the writer could not fail to discover something of the general 

 historic interest belonging to the development of certain institutions of 

 learning north, south, and west. To represent a school of history and 

 l)olitics in the South, he had proposed to introduce an account of Wil- 

 liam and Mary College into the above report, but this institution proved 

 80 generally interesting, as representing the history of education in Vir- 

 ginia, that the present Commissioner of Education, Col. N. H. li. Daw- 

 son, under whom the report on The Study of History was comi)leted 

 tor publication in 1887, encouraged further elaboration of the above ac- 

 count for a special Circular of Information. The monograph on The 

 College of William and Mary ; a Contribution to the History of Higher 

 Education, with Suggestions for its National promotion, was issued as 

 Circular No. 1, 1887, and was cordially welcomed by the friends of 

 higher education in all parts of the country, — nortli, sotitii, east, and 

 west. Aside from the generous public interest kindled in the honora- 

 H. Mis. 224 15 



