The educational functions of the State are, of course, a peculiar principle of American civilization.  Nearly all State constitutions provide that education is a natural right, and the first common school supported by general taxation appears in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay before the year 1640.  The principle of compulsory education exists throughout all the States, and in all education of the most diversified kind is given, from the primary school or kindergarten to the State university or technical school of applied science, trade, or business.  Nearly all the States have established State universities which are free or open at a nominal charge.  Massachusetts continues to rely upon a semi-private institution, Harvard University, which, indeed, is expressly mentioned in its constitution.  Provision is universally made also for evening schools, for industrial schools, for public libraries, and for popular elections, and besides the ordinary educational laws and the truant laws, there is in the statutes concerning labor matters abundant machinery for requiring some education as a preliminary to any employment.  The age of compulsory education may be said to average between the ages of eight and fifteen, though the limits are extended either way in the divers States.  Farm schools and industrial reform schools generally exist, both as a part of the present system and of the educational department.  Coeducation in State schools and colleges is almost universal.  On the other hand, as we have shown, the segregation of the races is in some States insisted upon.  Several States forbid the employment of teachers under the age of sixteen, or even eighteen.  Free text-books are generally provided.  The period of compulsory schooling varies from the classic twelve weeks in the winter, as in old New England, to substantially the full academic year.  Textile and other manual training schools exist in some States, but have generally evoked the opposition of organized labor, and are more usually created by private endowment.  The tendency of civil service reform legislation, furthermore, has been to require a certain minimum of education, though it may be feared that the forecast of De Tocqueville remains justified; our national educational weakness is our failure to provide for a “serious higher instruction.”

The great question of taxation we may only mention here by way of exclusion.  It is naturally a matter for treatment by itself.  The reader will remember (see chapter VII) that nearly all the States have now inheritance taxes besides direct property taxes, and many of them have income taxes and, in the South particularly, license taxes, or taxes upon trades or callings.  They all tax corporations, nearly always by an excise tax on the franchise or stock, distinct from the property tax or the tax upon earnings.  In both corporation taxes and inheritance taxes they are likely to find themselves in conflict with the Federal government, or at least to have duplicate systems taxing the same subjects, as, indeed, already considerable injustice is caused by inheritance taxes imposed in full in each State upon the stock of corporations lying in more than one State.  In such cases the tax should, of course, be proportionate.