hand over to the university the $16,625 retained by him as attorney He answered that they had, by resolution duly entered upon their records, contracted to pay him one-fourth of what they should recover in the suit. The trustees replied that at the date referred to Mr. Judah was secretary of their board and had falsely entered the resolution upon. their record, which Mr. Judah denied. Though two favorable decisions were gained by the trustees in the lower courts, Mr. Judah carried the case to the Supreme Court of the United States, and in 1864 gained a reversal, and the suit ended in his retention of the fees.

We have carried this recital forward in point of time in order to place. in connection the related events in the history of this pioneer institution. It is an interesting part of the educational history of the State. After the reorganization of its trustees by the enabling act of 1838, and after they had recovered by litigation more than $40,000 of its land endowment, the Vincennes University, in 1853, again opened för academic instruction: Its endowment has since been increased to over $60,000, and its corps of instructors have brought the institution into the condition of a vigorous academic school. In 1856 a department for women was added to the school. This continued in successful operation as a separate department until 1870. In that year it was deemed advisable to unite the two schools, and since then pupils of both sexes have had the same teachers and recited in the same classes.

Owing to the curtailment of its revenues by the action of the legis. lature the school has never become the complete institution designed by the founders, but has corresponded to the most advanced high schools and academies. It makes no pretensions to more than this at the present time. However, opportunities have been offered to those. who desire to take a more advanced course to do so. Its regular graduates are enabled without examination to enter the Junior class of the State University, and are prepared for that grade in similar institu tions. President E. A. Bryan is a graduate of Indiana University, class of 1878, and his administration has won for the institution a confident and growing favor.

The early history of Vincennes University is an essential part of the history of higher education by the State. In its early life it may be said to represent the first effort of the people toward a State university. During the most of its career its record is inseparably connected with the early conduct and attitude of the State toward higher education. Naturally its history leads our consideration to the Indiana University, to the account of which we presently turn. But before doing so, however, we wish to direct attention to the common school system of Indiana.

CHAPTER III.

THE COMMON SCHOOL SYSTEM OF INDIANA.

I. THE OLD CONSTITUTION AND THE COMMON SCHOOLS.

"They are the most ignorant people in the world. There is not a fiftieth man that can either read or write."

These words were spoken of the inhabitants of the Wabash Valley and the adjacent country by Governor St. Clair in 1790. What hath a century wrought? Then there lived here a people isolated from civilization, almost untouched by the influences of refinement and culture. They were living in a wilderness among savage beasts and sav. age men. The English-speaking population, outside of the military posts, consisted almost entirely of refugee adventurers who had come across the mountains, or followed the river courses, to reach the neighborhood of the old French settlements, or for the purpose of forming new settlements of their own. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Americans, as Governor St. Clair himself records, had all given to Clark's late Indian expedition of 1786 all that they could spare, and "often much more than they could spare with any convenience to themselves." Most of these people had always been ignorant; the Indian wars had left all of them poor. P. Gibault, priest, and eighty-seven others are our witnesses to the "statement that the settlers comprised a few unhappy beings who are scarcely able to support their pitiful existence, not knowing where to find a morsel of bread to nourish their families."1 At the time of which St. Clair and Gibault spoke, the French settler and his mode of life had not yet given place entirely to the institutions and spirit of English civilization. Within less than two decades thereafter the Frenchman had disappeared as an element of influence in the institutional life of Indiana Territory, and the fact that his civilization and law had ever contested the soil was attested chiefly by the names he had left upon the map.

When Indiana became a separate Territory in 1800 the inhabitants were still poor, ignorant, unaspiring, unchanging; simple and relig ious, it may be, but especially marked by a conspicuous absence of the spirit of enterprise. All reminiscences of that day, and some years later, go to prove that they had but little thought to give to education. Mr. Washburn, in his sketch of Gov. Edward Coles, of Illinois, bears testimony to this fact in his description of the "poor white" element

'Dillon's History of Indiana.

36

which came from the Carolinas, and other parts of the South, into the southern settlements of Illinois and Indiana. Judge Burnett, of Ohio, in his "Notes" on the early life of the Territory, describes the inhabitants as strikingly ignorant and superstitious, treading in the footsteps of their fathers, imitative, destructive in their agricultural methods, exhausting their fields and then abandoning them, not seeming to know of any improvements in agriculture since the days when Noah planted his vineyard.

These few indications may serve to give us some idea of the land and the people in Indiana in the two decades which met at the threshold of the nineteenth century. No doubt the picture, in large measure, is one of ignorance and poverty. Nevertheless the American bad scarcely set his foot in the Territory before the project of free schools followed his coming. That he came in poverty renders his efforts for the realization of his desire all the more to his honor.

We have seen what beginnings were made in higher education in the unsettled Territory in the first decade of this century. We wish now to trace the growth and influence of common schools for the people.

Nearly a half century elapsed from the time the Vincennes University was established by the early pioneers of Indiana before the plan of the present common-school system of the State was completed in the Constitution of 1851. Why was there such delay in providing a common system for universal popular education? Was it that the men who founded Indiana were indifferent to the benefits of free education for all the people? Or, were they unwilling to undertake the burdens and responsibilities necessary for its provision? Or, did they fail to appreciate the necessity of popular education under a popular government? The evidence which we discover as we follow the history of Indiana pioneers all goes to prove that they had an earnest appreciation of these important elements in the upbuilding of a State. They were not forgetful of the truth which Jefferson had taught-that "if a people expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never can be;" and they were far from endorsing, either in their opinions or by their public conduct, the old dogma and heresy of privileged rulers-that the ignorance of the masses is necessary to their obedience to law. Rather, they were possessed with a spirit of willingness to undergo a continuous struggle for the sake of their schools and colleges. It was not an easy task which they had before them, nor one which they could be expected to accomplish in a year or a decade; and it is not surprising to those who have studied the conditions of their early life that more than a generation elapsed with the people of Indiana before they had worked out a comprehensive system of schools to be applied in common to all the communities of the State. Those who understand the impediments and difficulties which they endured will not speak in disparagement of them in this respect. In their first State Constitution, as we shall see, the people made it incumbent upon

subsequent legislatures to establish a system of common schools-a responsibility from which subsequent generations could never escapeand the early efforts in this direction, without precedents or models, or means, or the conveniences of settled communities, is proof sufficient of the earnest desire of the people for educational advancement.

It must be remembered that when the early home-hunters came into Indiana they came, in the great majority of cases, in comparative poverty. The uplands of Indiana were in densest forest, the lowlands were often flooded, and the prairies were for the most part in undrained swamps. Judge D. D. Banta, in his account of the early years of the university, says of the early comers: "These were all poor men, poor even for their own day. Most were able to buy 40, 80, or 100 acres of land at 'Congress price,' but there were comparatively few who could do more. What had they undertaken? To subdue the wilderness; to wrest from reluctant nature a livelihood for themselves and their families; to construct highways; to build towns; to establish churches and schools-in a word, to make a State. What had they to encounter? The story of their hardships never has been and never can be fully told. There was the forest, dense, damp, and gloomy, unexcelled in its mag. nitude in this forest continent of ours; swamps interminable where now are fruitful fields; wild beasts waiting to devour the products of labor; the late and early frosts; the annual floods; the want of markets; a financial revulsion more disastrous in its consequences than has ever cursed the people of Indiana since; and the almost universal prevalence of the autumnal and other sickness peculiar to a new country. From 1820 to 1825 the mortality in the State was appalling. In the fall of 1820 the sickness in the Blue River settlements was so great that there were not enough well people to nurse the sick ones. In 1822 an epidemic of fever broke out in the new town of Indianapolis, and carried off 72 persons, an eighth of the population. In 1820 over 100 out of a population of 600 died in Vevay. Palestine, then the seat of justice in Lawrence County, was nearly depopulated." "In most neighborhoods," says another historian, "there were but few persons who escaped without one or more severe attacks of fever. Death numbered his victims by hundreds. The land was filled with mourning, and the graveyards were filled with the pioneer dead."

It was in such times as these that the subsoiling and preparation were going forward for the system of education which, it has often been thought, was conceived and invented in the second constitutional convention of 1851. But it is to be observed that it is not by quick invention that lasting and worthy institutions arise. Rather the slowly acquired habits of life, the experiences gained through difficulties and failures, are the means by which firm foundations are established. The English-speaking people receive their organized life, in civil society, law, politics and education, not from persuasion, philosophy or logic but from the realities of actual experience. Because of this is it so

frequently said that our institutions are a growth. To make great institutions out of hand, either educational or political, has seldom, if ever, fallen to the lot of any people. Noticing this truth in the growth of institutions we may truly say that the common-school system of Indiana, as it is to-day, is in no inconsiderable measure the result of these 50 years of apparent neglect, defeat, and failure. The people were learning in the severe school of adversity.

It is well further to emphasize the fact that the Indiana school system is not the product of some creative genius in the constitutional convention of 1851, a body which has been, perhaps, too much eulogized by such assertions in Indiana educational literature. The idea was of earlier origin. As ex-Superintendent John W. Holcombe has said, "the conception and invention of our system took place in the minds of our territorial statesmen." True, the date of 1851 marks an epoch in Indiana educational development. Within a few years, under the operation of a new Constitution and a new law, a great change occurred in the aspect of public education, and it seemed that all these things which were good had come from the measures which were new. "But what is the teaching of history?" asks a social reformer, "but that great transformations, while ages in unnoticed preparation, when once inaugurated, are accomplished with a rapidity and resistless momentum proportioned to their magnitude, not limited by it."

The labor of a generation, and the changed conditions resulting therefrom, had made possible the realization of what had been the constant desire, we may even say the settled purpose, of men who had come before. The principle of uniform education in free schools supported by the State came down through the Constitution of 1816 from the men who first made Indiana a State. The men of the convention of 1851 may be said to have recognized, certainly they did not conceive, the idea as a policy for the State. To their honor it may be said that, by the line of positive progress which they pursued, they gave the idea a favorable opportunity to develop. We should look with gratitude to the workers of the later convention, but we must not fail to recog nize the work of their fathers, who laid the foundation upon which they stood. That the people strove for a generation without accomplishing the object in view does not prove the effort to have been useless or vain, or that the object was not clearly apprehended.

The first Constitution under which the people seemed to be struggling toward a goal which itself had set before them, continually reminded the general assembly of what had yet to be done. This Constitution was adopted in convention at Corydon in 1816. It contained these provisions on the subject of education:

1. "Knowledge and learning generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government, and spreading the opportunities and advantages of education through the various parts of the country being highly conducive to this end, it shall