USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Cambridge fifty years a city, 1846-1896; an account of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 2-3, 1896 > Part 8
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And when we come to the War of the Rebellion, we learn that the sons were no less patriotic than the fathers, for in this struggle for the preservation of the Union, Cambridge furnished to the army 4135 men, and to the navy 453 men, which was about one sixth of the entire population, and again must have taken nearly every able-bodied man of military age in the entire community. I doubt if there is another community in the en- tire country that can present a record superior to this. Nor should we forget, in this connection, that to Cambridge right- fully belongs the honor of organizing the first company of United States Volunteers. Some of you men will remember -for I doubt not that there are those before me to whom belongs the great honor of having joined that company -that soon after the presidential election of 1860, it became apparent to far-seeing men that the ancient feud concerning slavery inust result, inevitably, in open hostilities, and that with patriotic foresight James P. Richardson, having inherited the spirit of his great-grandfather, who fell at the battle of Lexington, or- ganized a company of militia. And when in 1861 there flashed over the wires the news that Old Glory had been fired upon in Charleston Harbor, and later came the call of President Lincoln
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for 75,000 volunteers to defend the honor of the American Republic, and Governor Andrew wired his order to the sons of Massachusetts to respond, the very next morning Captain Richardson and ninety-five members of his company marched to thic state house and signified that they were ready to obey orders. Quick work ; but it only shows the stuff that the mnen of Cambridge, descendants of Revolutionary Minute-Men, were made of. There were ninety-seven men in the company that enlisted for three months ; but at the end of that time ninety- three of them reenlisted for the war. In the words of one of these, who voiced the sentiments of all, he was " determined to go back to the seat of war and to fight till the war was over, and if need be he would leave his bones to bleach on Southern soil." How full of meaning his words were you may know as you read his name, Edwin T. Richardson, among those in- scribed upon the monument on Cambridge Common. Of this first company twenty-one, more than one in five, gave life for the country's salvation.
The time may come - I am sure that all soldiers, who know from experience the horrors and the awful brutalities of war, hope and pray that it will soon come - when peace shall reign supreme on earth ; when disputes between nations and commu- nities shall be settled not by the arbitrament of war, but by the arbitration of justice in the parliament of man, the federation of the world. But whether that day comes soon or late the time will never arrive when men shall cease to reverence self-sacri- fice, when the love of country shall cease to be honorable, when the heroes of Marathon, of Balaclava, of Concord, of Bunker Hill, of Gettysburg, and the Wilderness, shall cease to be mentioned with honor and gratitude.
So I feel sure that the foundations of our city are laid as they should be. We have a free city, - one where religion has its strong place, where education is honored, and patriotism flourishes. What further is necessary? Only this : that we as citizens shall realize that the foundation is not the city ; that there is much for us all yet to perform ; that if Cambridge is to go on to the large achievements for which its founders destined it, we in our lives must do our duty ; that we must, like the brave and self-sacrificing men of the past, think first of the welfare of our country, and afterwards of the honor, the wealth, the prosperity of the individual ; that we, too, must be
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willing to work, to sacrifice, to suffer, if need be, for the good of the state.
It is a great thing to have had noble citizens. It is a better thing to have them. It is a splendid thought that our fathers obeyed God and did their duty. It is better for us to obey God and do our duty. It is a proud thought that Cambridge has had a glorious history. It is better to face the future with promise and with determination. We are not at the end. There are problems before us, of which I may not speak at this time, the like whereof our fathers had not to face. The need is still, and ever will be, of strong, self-sacrificing men who value country above self.
May the blessing of God be with the sons as it has been with the fathers, that we may be able to build a city in liberty, equality, fraternity, for the glory of God and the highest life of humanity.
PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART.1
THIS is a time of rejoicing over the growth and prosperity of our beloved home city ! Everywhere there is pride and sat- isfaction in the results of the half-century, and a Cambridge man may say to-night, like Saul of Tarsus: " I am a citizen of no mean city." Throughout our streets there is abounding material evidence of this exultation. Banners celebrate it ; drums beat it home ; processions rejoice in it; and banquets prolong it. But while we thus rejoice over the wealth and advance of the city, we have equal reason for pride in a moral and intellectual growth, the enjoyment and the celebration of which will continue when banners arc dust, when the drummers are gone, and when even the speakers of this week are for- gotten.
The subject assigned to me to-night happily groups together two great systems of education, two institutions, both of which are almost as old as the town of Cambridge, and which will stand while the city has a name among inen, - Harvard College and the public schools. Such an association is espe- cially suitable in this building ; for, when this structure was removed from its former site, where now the gymnasium stands, Harvard College lost an excellent neighbor. There is also an old-time relation between Harvard and the religious and moral forces of Cambridge. Were not the college and the First Church both founded in 1636? Did not the college for nearly two centuries own the ferry which was the only direct commu- nication with Boston and by which many divines made their way to preach in the parent church from which this society has sprung ? Did not the town of Cambridge in 1672 subscribe what was then the large sum of £200 for a new church build- ing ?
Considering this early connection and long cooperation, it is surprising that there should now be such a jealousy of the
1 Address delivered at the North Avenue Congregational Church, May 31.
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college on the side of some of the Cambridge taxpayers who resent the large amount of untaxed real estate appropriated to college uses. Perhaps one might ask whether the value of adjacent real estate and the tax duplicate of Cambridge would be increased if the college were to be abandoned, and its site were to be cut up into building-lots. There is not a neighbor of Cambridge that would not be happy to pay a million dollars and forego taxation in perpetuity, if the college could be removed and placed within its borders. If there has ever been a time when the college showed insufficient gratitude for the protection which it received from the Cambridge government that time is past ; and in these days there is a revival of the feeling of common interest between the college and the city. This is seen especially in education : for the college has heartily cooperated with the school authorities in offering opportunities to Cam- bridge teachers, and thus in improving the training of the chil- dren. The city and the college have a common purpose, - that of beautifying our borders, stimulating young minds, and well governing the community.
Let us look a little more closely into the relation between the educational institutions of Cambridge and the growth of the city. And, first, what have these institutions done for the city ? They have shared in and surpassed its growth. In 1846, Har- vard had about 600 in attendance; in 1896, 4400 persons appear upon its catalogue, and that of Radcliffe College, as students. Its funds have increased from seven hundred and twenty-five thousand to eight millions of dollars ; its annual income from seventy thousand dollars to one million dollars. The growth of the public schools and the increase in the num- ber of buildings of various kinds has been as striking. In 1846 the university in Cambridge was made up of the col- lege, the divinity school, and the law school. To this have been added the scientific school, the graduate school, all the great university museums, and great contributions to the library, the observatory, and the special collections : Har- vard was then a small local college; it is now a world- renowned university. Besides the university, the city may now boast of three other institutions of advanced learning : Radcliffe College, the place in all the world in which a woman may have the best opportunities of university instruction ; the Episcopal Theological School, and the New-Church Theological
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School. Private schools have increased in like ratio ; and for the one feeble public high school of 1846, we now have three large and flourishing high schools. For a very clemen- tary and disjointed system of lower schools, we have substi- tuted the well-articulated city graded schools. In addition to the public schools, there are the well - appointed parochial schools. The city boasts also the Social Union and the Pros- pect Union, useful educational institutions; the latter a most successful meeting-place for young men who have had the best advantages with young men who have had ordinary advan- tages of education. We have also a public library, excel- · lently and beautifully housed. In number of schools, colleges, and professional schools, in buildings and equipments, the city is immeasurably richer than it was in its infancy, fifty years ago.
The efficiency of education of all kinds has increased faster even than the numbers of pupils or the money to educate them. Harvard in 1846 was, in its curriculum and methods of teach- ing, not much further advanced than is the Latin school to-day. The grammar schools of 1896 are probably more effective than the high school of 1846. These institutions, working together, have furnished to the youth of this city such a combination of educational advantages as is not to be found anywhere else in the land. How many of our councilors, aldermen, and mayors have been pupils in the public school during the last fifty years ? How many have been graduates of the college ? How many, like Cambridge's governor, have passed through both parts of our educational combination ? One of the reasons for the remarkable success of the city government of Cambridge, which is undoubtedly the best enjoyed by any large city in the United States, is due to the fact that so many of the officers of Cambridge have availed themselves of these great opportu- nities.
These well-known advantages have been a powerful attraction both to visitors and residents. Abiel Holmes, in 1800, says of his town : "It is generally conceded that this town eminently combines the tranquillity of philosophic solitude with the choicest pleasures and advantages of refined society." And, indeed, what brought to Cambridge Longfellow, and Asa Gray, and Goodwin, and Agassiz, and Child, - men known among educated persons all over the world, - what brought them
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hither but the educational institutions of Cambridge ? Beck Hall and Follen Street commemorate two Germans drawn hither by this college. Who can count the number of families who have made their homes in Cambridge because of the schools and college for their children ? And no spot in America receives more pilgrims from at home and abroad than does Cambridge. Do they come to see the factories or the Harvard Bridge? They come because of the educational institutions and the intellectual society which gathers about them. To its educational institutions Cambridge owes the oft-repeated visits of men such as Washington Gladdeu, aud Lyman Abbott, and Phillips Brooks ; and the brief presence of President Washing- ton. Lafayette, Andrew Jackson, President Graut, and President Cleveland.
A reputation for the manufacture of useful goods is well worth having; but Cambridge can never compete as a manu- facturing city with Lowell, or Lawrence, or Mauchester, or Fall River, or Worcester. On the other hand, not one of those cities for a moment compares with Cambridge in public reputation. This reputation is not due to the university aloue : the name of Cambridge is known wherever a book is known that has been printed at the University Press or the Riverside Press ; the schools of Cambridge are known wherever a teacher de- sires to learn the latest of reforms ; the writers of Cambridge are known wherever the English language is read. I remen- ber the pride with which once, in Westminster Abbey, I heard a mention of one of my townsmen, then recently dead. A plainly dressed woman. showing her child over the Abbey, came to a bust. " Ah!" said she, "that is Longfellow, an American poet, a sweet poet ; you remember the ‘ Village Blacksmith !'" And wherever meu love learning, love wit, love generous sympathy with the right, and love the truth, the name of James Russell Lowell is renowned. Cambridge is one of the world's renowned intellectual centres.
The burden of obligation is, however, not all on the side of the educational institutions. If the city during the last fifty years has been favored by them, on its side it has done its duty to them. First of all, it has supported generously its system of public schools. In 1846, the school taxes were about $5000, or fifty cents per head of population ; in 1896 the school expenses were about $250,000, or three dollars per head. The poor little
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high school building of 1846 is soon to be replaced by three beautiful and commodious buildings costing together nearly · $600,000 : Cambridge does not stint her schools. The city has well supported its educational institutions in another way, - by sending the children to them; and the better the schools the larger the number of pupils in the higher grades. Cambridge has also furnished a steady stream of students to Harvard College, among whom may be counted Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Eustis Russell.
The city has also well protected the institutions of learning. No city in this commonwealth, which has the best compulsory educational law in the country, so efficiently administers its truant system as Cambridge. And, above all, the majority of the voters of Cambridge, in ten successive elections have pro- tected not only the schools but the college by the no-license vote. In the name of the college I desire to thank the people of our city for removing a dangerous temptation from the students of the college.
This is a splendid tradition of fifty years, indeed of two hundred and fifty years. In the midst of our rejoicing, let us not forget wherein the greatness and distinction of this city lies. Let us also not forget the duty which we owe to posterity. If the last two generations have so improved and sustained schools and college, we shall be inferior to them if we simply hold our own. As streets increase, let school buildings increase. As people come into Cambridge, let improvements come into our schools. We have received a great heritage, and shall be unfaithful stewards if we do not enlarge it. So shall " the streets of the city be full of children, playing in the streets thereof."
1
HONORABLE FRANK ALPINE HILL, LITT. D.,1
SECRETARY OF THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION.
I HAVE a friend, a remarkably bright fellow, but his wit is an intermittent spring. When the spring is in action, he is the life of a dinner party, but woe to that life if the hostess in some moment of awkward silence should so far forget herself as to beseech him to be witty. No more bubbling from that spring while the dinner lasts.
And yet that is precisely what the hostess has done this afternoon. She has as much as said : "Here are my bright boys - aren't they bright ? - and my lovely girls - aren't they lovely ?- and their teachers and lots of my dearest friends. It is my best possible spread, my prettiest dishes and spoons, and it won't come again for fifty years. Now please, sir, sparkle all over as you never sparkled before !" That is enough, my friends, to seal the very fountains of genius.
The story goes how Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott, and the rest started a club once out in Concord. I fancy their aim was to consider the world, which way it was drifting, and whether, if they pulled together, they could swerve it from that drift or not. But they were all so imbued with the neces- sity of saying each his brightest and profoundest say that they didn't say much of anything, and so the club fell through. This is what often comes from great expectations.
·
Our theme this afternoon is the rather vague and glittering one of the city's fiftieth anniversary. It suggests minor themes by the score. Here is a good one, for instance, in the Latin inscription on the wall above this platform. There is a deal of Cambridge history in it. I beg the president of the uni- versity, the mayor of the city, and others here not to be dis- turbed ; I haven't the remotest intention of calling them up to translate it. I assume that they and you and every Cantabri-
1 Address delivered to the pupils of the English High and Latin schools, and the higher grades of the Parochial schools, at Sanders Theatre, June 2.
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gian can handle it, and put it, too, into that chaste and elegant English that marks the speech of a university city. Indeed, the translation of this passage is the favorite pastime of Cam- bridge audiences here, when they tire of the speakers.
If this were a millionth anniversary now instead of the fiftieth, we might, with the aid of the university museum, note some contrasts between the past and present worth talking abont, - real sensational contrasts that would please the news- papers, - an ancestry swinging among the treetops at one end of the line, their descendants riding on two wheels at the other ; gibberish at the beginning of the evolution, Greek at the end of it; and so on.
Or if this were a millennial occasion, like the brilliant cele- bration now going on at Buda Pesth in Hungary, it would still offer chances for a striking antithesis or two.
But being only a fiftieth anniversary - well, we shall have to put up with such mild contrasts as we can find.
A schoolmaster's thoughts naturally run to-day to the past and the present of Cambridge school conditions. If we go back fifty or sixty years, we shall find an Arcadian simplicity, if not a barbaric rudeness, in some of these conditions.
If all the school buildings in the state sixty years ago had been sold for what they would bring, they would not have yielded money enough to pay for the buildings, present and proposed, of the Cambridge High and Latin schools. Cam- bridge had her share of these poor buildings. Just before we became a city, the Cambridge School Committee under the leadership of Rev. William A. Stearns, subsequently president of Amherst, fearlessly showed up every schoolhouse in town. It was, on the whole, a pitiable picture, abounding in such epithets as these : "old, leaky, and rotten ; " "shamefully marked, dirty, and uninviting ; " " marred with words and cuts too recent to allow any apology for the depravity that occa- sioned them ; " and so on. I do not mean to imply that the spirit of vandalism was then general in the schools, but only this, - that what there was could not be checked, and so the buildings suffered under its cumulative effects until they be- came intolerable.
The committee tried to be just towards the schoolhouses they denounced. One of these buildings, for instance, they de- scribed as " truly a noble structure," although they said in the
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same breath that it was badly ventilated, its floors shrunken and unclean, its plastering falling, and its cellar all afloat. Another was even "magnificent," but all its magnificence - it cost five or six thousand dollars, I think - did not save it from criticism, for it was in many points very defective. From that day to the present, there has been a steady gain in schoolhouse construction and conditions.
It was counted a marvelous feat that during Horace Mann's twelve years of service the state expended two million dollars on her schoolhouses. The state now expends more than that sum in a single year in erecting new buildings and improving old ones. And superb structures many of them are - how superb the boys and girls of to-day who attend school in them are never likely to know except as they listen to stories of the weather-worn, rickety schoolhouses their ancestors used to go to.
If, my young friends, you will do as well in study, manners, manliness, womanliness, as the city has done for you in brick and mortar and material surroundings, the cup of municipal joy will be filled to the brim.
Then there is the equipment of the schools. Here, too, there have been some great strides. Let me picture to you the equipment of a school where I once taught a winter term more years ago than I dare to tell, - but it was n't fifty, sir, I assure you, - a typical, down - east ungraded school, its building a disreputable survivor of the thousands that were common in New England before Cambridge ceased to be a town.
It was in the outlying ward of a city and yet on the edge of the wilderness. It was only the winter before that a moose came down out of the woods, passed by the schoolhouse win- dows, crossed the St. Croix on the ice, and disappeared in the New Brunswick forest.
It might have been a high school, - I had a boy in Homer fitting for Harvard. It might have been a primary school, - I had children learning their letters. I taught them the old- fashioned, senseless way, -this is A, what is this ? The method of suspended animation it was even then called, but I did not know it.
Your teachers have polished desks of cherry, quartered oak, and what not. My desk was not a desk, but a table of cheap, unpainted pine, with three legs ; the fourth I made myself with
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edging from the school woodpile. Your best blackboards are of smooth, black, agreeable slate. I was limited to a frame of blackened boards, worn a dingy white, splintery, with liere and there a knot-hole. You have carefully prepared crayons, the dust reduced to a minimum and the surface glazed for dainty fingers. My crayons were angular lumps direct from the chalk cliffs of England that would scratch a little, crumble a little, and mark a little in unexpected places.
There has always been plenty of pure air, - whole skyfuls of it. In the new Latin school building this air will be warmed in reasonable quantity, gently fanned through the rooms and corridors, and kept, I suppose, at a uniform temperature by automatic regulators. My schoolhouse seldom got much of this air inside except in great freezing doses through the doors at the wrong times; and as for heating - well, there was the great rusty box-stove whose roaring fire fairly made the near benches smoke, but scarcely reached the pupils shivering in the corners. I can see its long funnel even now, with drip-pans at the joints to catch the sooty condensations, the pans themselves leaking inky drops to the floor.
You have free text-books, abundant, beautiful, fascinating ; my pupils brought to school indescribable odds and ends of books, in all stages of use and disuse, family heirlooms or per- haps they were borrowed, not enough to go around, and seldom three alike. Maps, globes, reference books, music, drawing, - you have them all, not in such kind and quantity, perhaps, as you need, but still you have them. I had none of these things.
Even the school janitor as you know him is a creation of modern need, a concession to modern luxury. In the school I am describing the pupils were their own janitors, and the teacher, in emergencies, janitor-in-chief.
But enough in this line. The picture I have given you does not belong to 1846, indeed, but it has details that would fit many a Cambridge school at that time.
And when it comes to methods of teaching, the fifty years have witnessed changes equally marked. Let me cite a single method that belongs to the modern school of the better sort, --- the laboratory method, so-called, of learning by doing.
Nothing can make so deep an impression upon you in school as what you do with eyes, ears, hands, and mind working to- gether. Things are branded into the mind so as to stay. Now
-
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if the things that get fixed in this way are well-selected things, if they are the great root ideas of the subjects to study, they become centres of growth, - stout mental pegs, as it were, on which you can scarcely help hanging what belongs there, and by which it is easy to hold what is hung there.
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