medical education had profited accordingly by the process of wholesome and benevolent contraction.

Other professional schools yielded to the same tendency. The Chicago College of Pharmacy, founded in 1859, became the School of Pharmacy of the University of Illinois in 1896. The University Dental College, chartered in 1887, was merged with Northwestern University in 1891 after a brief experiment with affiliation, and seven years later the University purchased the Northwestern College of Dental Surgery, closed the college and added the plant to the Northwestern University Dental School. Training schools for nurses have likewise sought university connections.

Another phase of the law of mass attraction is revealed in the tendency of theological schools to seek actual or practical affiliation with strong and diversified universities offering advanced and graduate courses in fields closely allied with the newer type of instruction in divinity schools, such as sociology, psychology, religious education, and industrial organization. Garrett Biblical institute, though an entirely independent school of the Methodist church, is located on the campus of Northwestern University, and the corresponding divinity school of the Protestant Episcopal church has plans for removal to a similar location offered by the University. By a stipulation of Mr. Rockefeller the Baptist theological school became a part of the University of Chicago and has profited by the marvelous development of that institution. The Chicago Theological Seminary of the Congregational Church has moved from another part of the city to a block adjacent to the University of Chicago and is there enlarging its specialized work in a new plant. The seminaries of the Universalist and Disciples churches have moved into comparable strategic and significant locations. About Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of California a like clustering of theological schools has appeared during the period here discussed.

Close to the University of Illinois at Urbana a quite different auxiliary group of social-religious institutions has already taken imposing shape in the Foundations established by the Methodist, Catholic, Disciples, and Jewish forces. The first mentioned has a noble and beautiful building on a block adjoining the campus, in which are centered social activities and accommodations for classes of collegiate grade, acceptable to the University, in religious education Biblical history and literature, and the like. Though less adequately housed, the other Foundations give similar courses and are campaigning for worthy buildings and endowments as evidence of the profound conviction on the part of great and strong elements among the people of the State that religious instruction of the students in the tax-supported higher institutions of the State should be provided as an essential part of the program of well-ordered expansion.

The commitment of the State to larger and larger support, by means of taxation, of an expanding program of higher education which has as yet no revealed limits, is surely one of the marvels of the period here discussed. The mere figures of appropriation to the University of Illinois alone are eloquent with meaning: A biennial appropriation at the beginning of $60,000, an appropriation of $10,500,000 (of which $2,500,000 were for buildings) for the current biennium. Capitalized, the last figure represents approximately $100,000,000. In sharing in this program of expansion, the State has undertaken not merely high, and higher, education, but the highest education which concerns itself with research, investigation, and experimentation through the Graduate School, the Engineering Experiment Station, the Agricultural Experiment Station, the Bureau of Educational Research and the Bureau of Business Research. In 1907 Illinois made a specific appropriation of $100,000 for the biennium, for the support of the Graduate School, the first State grant of this kind in the United States. The high significance of the movement of which this appropriation is a sign and symbol has been very tersely put by a man who has had only an incidental connection. with State-supported education, President Henry S. Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Writing of State universities he says:

"The rise of these great universities is the most epoch-making feature of our American civilization, and they are to become more and more the leaders and makers of our civilization. They are of the people. When a State university has gained solid ground, it means that the people of a whole State have turned their faces toward the light."

For Illinois, the consummately resourceful leadership of a trio of great presidents, Draper, James, and Kinley, must ever be noted with gratitude and praise.

The last entry in this rapid survey of sixty years of higher education must deal with a newly-risen group of intermediate higher institutions, both publicly supported and privately supported, the junior colleges. Without the stirring up of a strong sentiment backing higher education, without the changed conviction as to the function of taxing bodies to provide some form of higher education, nearer and nearer the home of the student, such junior colleges as those in Joliet, one of the oldest in the country, La Salle, Elgin and Chicago (Crane Junior College, growing out of the Crane Technical High School) would not have reached their present remarkable momentum and service. They are not organized as a relief to an over-crowded State university, either in Illinois, Missouri, or California, but as an embodiment of the belief of the people of great communities that higher education should be furnished their boys and girls as a wise and proper expansion of the work of the elementary and secondary schools.

If a mere historian may venture upon a prophecy of the next

stage in the growth and progress which have been accomplished during these years, it would be this: that more and more the people of the states, of this state, are determined that there shall be an opportunity for every boy and girl at a minimum expense to get all the higher education he can carry. What that expense will be remains to be seen, but if there is anything in this history of the last fifty or sixty years, it is that the state itself, not domineeringly, not in a monopoly fashion, but co-operatively, insistently and determinatively has entered the field of high education, higher education and the highest education; that it will dictate only in those fields which touch the life and prosperity of all of its citizens, as in the case of medicine and law; that it will work co-operatively with all the agencies hand in hand.

From the time when the Federation of Illinois Colleges discussed whether they should not enter upon a strong campaign against state institutions, there has come a time when that Federation and the University of Illinois are in most cordial relations, a sign that whatever people are thinking as to higher education, they are thinking after all as a unit. Each institution or group according to the measure of its strength, each according to the diversity of its opportunity; each one, college, university and professional school, working unitedly for the betterment of the citizenship of the state. Out of this course shall come stronger cooperation, and stronger support for public and private educational enterprise.

THE SUBSCRIPTION SCHOOL AND THE SEMINARY IN PIONEER DAYS.

By CHARLES BEN-ULYN JOHNSON, M. D.

In 1855 there was placed on the Statute Books of Illinois what was popularly known as the "Free School Law." Called free school law because under its provisions the youth and children of our State were privileged to get a common school education, and more if desired, "without money and without price."

Very different were school conditions in Illinois previous to the passage of this law for in that period the average boy and girl got his or her knowledge of the three R's by attending what was known as the Subscription School. What was the Subscription, or as it was sometimes called, the Pay School? Well the Subscription School was one in which the teacher was paid directly from the pockets of the parents of the children in attendance. Before a Subscription School could be opened in a given locality, that locality was canvassed and the requisite number of Subscribers obtained, each of whom became financially responsible for one or more scholars. In effect these conditions deprived the children of the very poor man of practically all school advantages and too often these grew up lacking the ability to so much as read and write. Furthermore, in that period school houses, worthy of the name were few and far between.

Perhaps I cannot do better than to recount some of my own experiences with the Subscription School. The fall of 1848 found my father and his family living on a Prairie farm one and one-half miles west of the village of Pocahontas, Bond County, and the neighbors realizing that their children needed some school advantages, joined together and revamped an old log cabin in my father's orchard for a temporary school house. In one end of this cabin was an immense open fireplace that had an outlet through a stick chimney made fire-proof by a heavy coat of clay mortar. In the oposite end of the structure a log was removed and the space thus made was filled by a row of 8x10 window glass. In a log beneath this long narrow window holes were bored, in these strong oak pegs were driven upon which a wide long plank was laid and made to serve as a sort of desk for the pupils to write on. On the sleepers was a puncheon floor and upon this the requisite number of slab-seats. Perhaps it may be well to explain that a slab is the outer, or first, cut obtained in converting a saw-log into lumber and that it is round on one side and flat on the other. In converting a slab into a

seat holes were bored in its rounded side, strong oak pegs driven in these for legs thus leaving the flat side uppermost for the scholars to sit upon. In the middle of one side and just beneath the eaves was a rude door that swung on wooden hinges and fastened with a wooden latch. As a general rule, in the Subscription School Era the teacher boarded round among the scholars, and if he or she was appreciative, observing and had a due sense of humor, there was great opportunity for corralling much that was interesting, amusing, not to say instructive and illuminating. However, our teacher being a lame man got permanent board at our nearby home, a frame house of two rooms with open fireplace in each. Our immediate family consisted of seven members, my father, mother and five children, the youngest being a babe in arms. As said before the teacher was lame, had one normal leg and one that having had its growth arrested in childhood only reached to the knee of its fellow. To see the teacher hobling along on his crutch with the short leg properly pantalooned, stockinged, shod and dangling with every step, was certainly a novel sight to my five-year-old eyes. Our teacher was an Irishman with the patriotic name of O'Connor and like his countryman, Oliver Goldsmith, he played on the flute. After supper of winter evenings we all gathered around the fire in the sitting room and not unfrequently O'Connor would, at such times, play on his flute and the music to my unaccustomed ears was much finer than is today that of some famous orchestra with its hundred or more pieces.

O'Connor's school in the log school house proved to be a success and several young men from two or three miles away attended it. Occasionally there would be a severe storm and to obviate the necessity of these young men going through this to reach their distant homes my father would insist on their passing the night under his hospitable roof and just how my mother managed to stow them away in addition to the teacher and the seven members of her family, is hard to imagine. But the pioneer woman was resourceful and some how my mother "got by," or as we say since the World War, she in some way managed "to carry on."

In the spring of 1849 my father removed his family to the village of Pocahontas and a little later started on the overland trip to California, and thus became a "forty-niner", but this is another story. During the summer of 1849 I went to school in another old log cabin taught by a young lady who was my cousin. The winter of 1849-50, I attended a school taught in this same log building. The summer of 1850 I attended a school taught in an old-time Meeting House, a half mile west of our village. The winter of 1850-51, a school was taught in this same building but I did not attend. The summer of 1850 I went to a school taught by a man who housed it under his own roof.