ADDRESSES AND PAPERS OF THE GENERAL

ASSOCIATION.

OPENING SESSION AT TOPEKA, KANSAS.

GOVERNOR JOHN A. MARTIN addressed the Association as follows:Ladies and Gentlemen:

The unexpected postponement of an official engagement has enabled me to meet with you this evening, and, through the courtesy of your Executive Committee, I have been chosen to preside at this meeting.

I am very glad to know that the "Schoolmaster is abroad" to-day; and I rejoice, especially, to meet and greet the master and mistress of so many American schools.

I rejoice for several reasons. This great assemblage of teachers shows how deep and carnest is the interest you have in your profession, and it is, therefore, a happy and hopeful indication that the educational work of the land is in good hands. I am glad that you selected Kansas as your meeting place, because Kansas is an object-lesson that will impress itself upon your minds and hearts forever. And I rejoice over your coming, because I know that you will return to your homes and your work with larger, broader views of our country, and of that splendid system of schools which has made it what it is.

The people of Kansas are proud of many things pertaining to their State, but above everything else they place their schools. The loneliest region on our receding frontier has never been without its. schoolhouse-a dug-out or sod house, at first, perhaps, and these vanishing with the buffalo-grass, have given place to schoolhouses, always comfortable, and generally the most stately buildings in the neighborhood. Indeed, it is the boast of Kansas that the best building in every town and hamlet is the schoolhouse, and we have eight thousand of them. They dot every hill-side and valley, and account

for the fact that, in Kansas, the proportion of people unable to read and write is smaller than in any other state of the Union except one.

I will not, however, occupy your time by attempting to make a speech. I take pleasure in introducing to you my friend, Col. W. H. Rossington, who, on behalf of the people of Kansas and of Topeka, will formally welcome you to the State and to its Capital city.

ADDRESS OF WELCOME.

BY HON. W. H. ROSSINGTON.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

In behalf of the State of Kansas, and the City of Topeka, I have been honored by being charged with the pleasant duty of welcoming to the capital city of Kansas the members of this Association; a body of men and women more distinguished perhaps for learning, ability, and zeal for the welfare of humanity, than any that ever assembled in our State. I have, however, been impressed with the thought that my poor service in this behalf is unnecessary. You need no welcome to Kansas. Your sojourn here is like unto that of a victorious army camping upon a field it has won; for, Kansas, socially and politically, may be fairly said to be the procreant result of the educational idea. This nation was at the threshhold of its existence inexorably committed to the scheme of universal education. For in no other way could the founders hope to justify or sustain the challenge then made to the old world to erect a government founded upon the free will of the governed, wherein should exist perfect political equality, and which should vindicate by its continued and prosperous life the sovereignty of mere manhood. The old world idea was that universal education was not only Utopian and impossible but highly undesirable, because with knowledge would come discontent with that poverty to which the great mass of human beings is born. It was, moreover, believed that political equality would furnish discontent its opportunity.

But we had then, and have now, no choice. Whatever the potential dangers of universal education to the safety of our national fabric, the possible evils of limited and class education are so much greater to the success of our vast experiment that we must go on as we have begun. Since, then, it is a national duty to provide that all are in some meas ure educated, there has arisen among those conceding this principle, a controversy as to how much education and what sort of education. should be publicly furnished. It is generally admitted that illiteracy is an evil, but many deny that the public should furnish the largest opportunity for education to every child. A few would limit the public duty to affording out of the public revenue the commonest sort of common school education. The Kansas educational idea is perhaps as enlarged and liberal as that of any state in the Union, and it may be briefly stated to be, to give to every boy and girl entitled to school privileges in the state, the best education he or she will take.

When the first band of hardy pioneers looked upon this land all vacant and rolling in verdant, silent billows to the horizon, and saw that it was good, one of their earliest thoughts was of schools; and not only of schools but of universities, for the mental nurture and development of the future generation of freemen who should inherit the benefits and burdens of the great State they were about to build. The framers of our present state constitution gave most deliberate and earnest thought to two institutions upon which the society, for whose government they were providing, was mainly to rest, namely, the home and the school. The first rude, sod schoolhouse, built by the hardy pioneers where Lawrence now stands, in the spring of 1855, was raised by men who did not come to the wilderness to lapse into barbarism, but who meant to transplant New England culture into this new and fruitful soil, hoping and trusting that it might some day outgrow the parent stock. Poor and rude as was this foundation, it was the forerunner of a university of which the president of Harvard is reported to have recently said that "it perhaps had but one superior in the West, the university at Ann Arbor, Michigan."

You being, for the most part, people from other states, I would be recreant to my duty as a Kansan if I let you escape without impressing upon you certain statistics dating from that solitary, sod schoolhouse of thirty years ago. Kansas always comes out strong on figures.

Some one has said that the chief use of statistics is to beat some other man's statistics. It has been suspected that our phenomenal success

in raising wheat and corn has been largely stimulated by the demand for these cereals in statistical tables. You need not be alarmed however, for these figures will be brief and poetic, almost, in their suggestiveness. They are perhaps known to most of you, for Kansas does not conceal the facts of her growth. I compile them from a recent address of Governor Martin and you may accept them, therefore, as official. Beginning with the one sod schoolhouse in 1855, in 1860 we had 154 schoolhouses, (presumably of a similar kind, because the Governor does not set their money value down as anything.) 189 teachers, and 5,915 scholars. Without detaining you with the figures showing the intermediate growth, we had in 1885, 6,673 schoolhouses, 8,219 teachers, 335,176 scholars, and school buildings valued at $6,734,176. In 1861 we expended less than $2,000 for the support of schools, our able-bodied citizens being just then engaged in another important educational enterprise, to wit: in teaching our southern brethren that this is a nation one and inseparable. Several excellent gentlemen here present bear cordial testimony to how well this lesson has been learned. In 1885 we expended nearly three million dollars, and our total expenditure for the first twenty-five years of the State's existence for the support of public schools was $30,214,202.40. My friend, D. W. Wilder, who knows all that is worth knowing about the building of Kansas, recently called my attention to the significant fact that you can best trace the advancing settlements in every county in the State by following the numbers of the school districts, which also sustains my statement that the first consideration of every Kansas community is its school.

As a result of this magnifying the office of the schoolmaster in Kansas, our illiterates over the age of ten years in the State comprise not more than two per cent. of our population, notwithstanding it has been increased recently by a large addition of the freedmen of the South.

You will not hold it presumption upon my part, I trust, if, as a layman, I express a few thoughts which occur to me upon the subject of your most useful and beneficient profession, but will bear with me, although these thoughts should turn out to be trite and commonplace to you. I have said that the experiment of free government at its inception seemed to involve of necessity the education of the masses. I understand the purpose of your organization to be chiefly to promote this great national object. Your hearts are in the work; you bear the