uties of the
school-boards are as honestly and economically discharged as those of
any other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest
where common schools have been longest established and most thoroughly
studied; and that the statistics certainly show a steady advance in
their efficiency. That is the truest test. Any pecuniary means are
justifiable by the end. If common schools, themselves a means to a
higher education, mental and moral, than they can directly afford,
take some part of the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's
decaying, it is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress
more genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are the
exponents.

It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the one just
closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still unkempt continent,
the school actually precedes the pioneer. Choose his homestead where
he may, the sixteenth section is staked out before it. From it the
rills of knowledge soon trickle along the first furrows, as strange
to the soil as its new products. It provides the modern settler
in advance with an equipment, mental and material, if not moral,
altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables
him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He
attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor;
cuts his wheat with a cradle--or, given a neighbor or two, a
reaper--instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the
nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged
enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of
culture and intelligence which must adhere to any menage of to-day
and were out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that
travels West now is a different thing from that which went West a
hundred years ago.

Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as he has
done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his shortcomings
are notable. He has not learned how to eat his cake and have it. He
works the virgin soil as the miner does the coal-seam. What Nature has
placed in it he takes out, and, until forced by the pressure of
his friends and enemies, the cities, returns no nest-egg of future
fertility. So it is that many portions of the rural East have to
be resettled and started afresh in the process of agricultural
redemption. A hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat