Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/429

Rh and his people have been trained into thorough familiarity with the conception as an all-interpreting principle in both theology and politics. Yet evolution is only the expansion and full scientific elucidation and wider sweep of application of the idea of progress. Nor is there anything now in evolution more fatal to orthodoxy than there was a generation ago in the first vague divergence from the old rigid dogmatic systems in recognizing a progressive element in religion. Mr. Beecher and his people have been themselves evolved into their present position, and might furnish an object-lesson in the law of development. There will probably be more trouble in accepting the newer name appropriate to the later stage of growth than there has been in assimilating the underlying truth.

We congratulate Mr. Beecher on his intrepid course, and his determination to bring his pulpit into harmony with those revelations of science that a re-reshaping the thought of the age; and we commend his example to the numerous clergymen who give their private assent to evolution doctrine, and then go on promulgating the old beliefs from desks sacred to antiquated error.

a meeting of the Massachusetts Teachers 1 Association, held a short time ago, President Eliot, of Harvard, spoke in strong terms of the unsatisfactory character of the great majority of the so-called high-schools of the Commonwealth. Out of a total of two hundred and twenty-eight such schools, seventy-two only had as many as three teachers, and the whole together sent only one hundred and ninety-nine students to the colleges of the State during the year 1884. The simple fact, President Eliot states, is that the majority of the schools are not fit to prepare youths for matriculation at college, though in the general system of public-school education that is a recognized part of their function. "It has been the policy of the Board of Education," we are told, "to encourage small towns to establish high-schools in order that as large a percentage as possible of the population may have a school higher than the grammar-school within easy reach." That policy has been so far successful that over ninety per cent of the population nominally enjoy the privilege in question. The result, however, is a thinning and impoverishing of the education just in proportion to its extension. Seventy-five of the high-schools are maintained in towns of less than five hundred families. Nearly half of the whole number existing have less than sixty pupils each. President Eliot naturally calls for such a change in the law as may enable two or three or four smaller towns to establish a joint school, and employ in rendering it really efficient the funds which now are more or less frittered away upon the maintenance of two or more weak and inefficient schools. He also suggests that the colleges should meet the schools half-way by establishing liberal systems of options, so that no student need be debarred from the higher advantages that the colleges afford by his inability to pass an entrance-examination in one or two subjects in which he feels no interest, and which he has no ulterior intention of pursuing.

We call attention to this matter because we have reason to believe that the practical evil which the President of Harvard describes is not confined to the State of Massachusetts, but is widely prevalent throughout the country at large. It is a result, no doubt, of our democratic ideas, and of the local jealousies which, it will hardly be questioned, democratic institutions bring in their train, that we try to bring to every man's door what we bring to one man's door. The thing can only be accomplished, however, at the expense of a marked deterioration in the article