Finally, in 1828, ‘the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Common Schools,’ after demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the ‘pauper school’ law in a series of memorials, succeeded in having a state school fund established, and in 1834, “an act to establish a general system of education by common schools” was passed. This law established a state system of schools under the general superintendency of the secretary of state. For this system it appropriated $75,000 per annum from the income of the state school fund, and permitted the wards, townships, and boroughs, which it constituted school districts, to share in this, provided they levied local taxes for schools. The Northern counties, settled mostly by New England colonists, and the Western portion of the state, with its large element of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, ardently favored this encouragement of universal education, but the law was only ‘permissive’ and was bitterly opposed by the Quaker and German inhabitants of ‘old’ Pennsylvania, who feared that their own parochial schools would be replaced. The wealthy classes were also hostile to the new law, on the ground that they ought not to be taxed to educate other people’s children. In a vigorous campaign to repeal the act, however, the opponents of the law, largely through the eloquent speech of Thaddeus Stevens, were defeated the following year (1835), and the desire to establish public schools was greatly increased in 1836 by the passage of a new law, which enlarged the annual appropriation to $200,000, in which the school districts might participate only on condition of local taxation. Even then not more than one-half the districts took advantage of the opportunity, and it was several years before most of them claimed their share. Hence, while the battle was won by 1835, the consummation of public education in Pennsylvania did not take place until the great awakening of common schools had swept over the country. [Sidenote: Similar hindrances in New Jersey and Delaware.] After the formation of the Union, New Jersey and Delaware met with the same kinds of hindrance to the development of common schools as did Pennsylvania, and they were even slower in getting a system established. In both commonwealths a state school fund was started early in the nineteenth century, but it was not distributed for about a dozen years, and then it was used mostly for the education of paupers in subsidized private schools. Some ‘permissive’ legislation for the organization of school districts and commissioners and the establishment of public schools was also passed, but it accomplished little before the middle of the century. [Sidenote: Disintegration of the domination of Calvinism.]