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 to the acre.  Her standard is now thirty-two.  Within three-quarters of the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from thirty to fifteen.  But this process is a natural part of the sum of American progress.  Land was the only property of the country originally, and subsequently of different parts of it in succession.  It was used like any other commodity, and worn out like leather or cloth.  The original cuticle of the continent has disappeared for ever.  The task, now is to induce the granulation