This federal land endowment gave an additional stimulus to the establishment of public education in the four commonwealths--Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan--that were admitted from the Northwest Territory before 1840. But the final system of public education in these new states took form slowly for various reasons. The settlers were poor; incessant Indian wars, the wilderness, wretched roads, and lack of transportation facilities tended to repel immigrants and leave the country sparsely settled; the large tracts of school land were slow in acquiring value, and, to attract settlers, were often leased at nominal rates or sacrificed at a small price; and social distinctions and sectarian jealousies persisted among the immigrants. As a whole, immigration from the earlier commonwealths had followed parallels of latitude, and the northern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were occupied mostly by people from New England and New York, and the southern by former inhabitants of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and other states where the public school system was not yet as well developed. In Michigan, however, because of its northerly location, the great influx throughout the state had come from New York, New England, and Northern Ohio. [Sidenote: Struggle to secure public school system,--] [Sidenote: Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois;] [Sidenote: Michigan.] Consequently, the history of public education in the first three of the new states seems to be in each case largely a record of a prolonged struggle to introduce common schools among those of the people who had come from states not yet committed to this ideal, but Michigan, whose inhabitants had migrated from states where public education was in vogue, showed the germs of a public system even before statehood was conferred. The history of the common schools in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois is very similar in general outline. Each one started off by claiming two townships of land for a university and the sixteenth section for schools, and the state constitution committed it to equal school opportunities for all. But not until the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century was a system of common schools, with the organization of districts, appointment of school officers, and local taxation provided by the legislature. Even then the acts were largely ‘permissive,’ the tax was not exacted from anyone who objected, and for some time various laws allowed public funds to be paid to existing private schools for the tuition of the poor. The complete system with a state superintendent was first organized in Ohio by 1836, but a similar stage of development was not reached by the other two states until after the great wave of common school development (1835-1860) had passed over the country. Michigan, on the other hand, as early as 1817 established a ‘catholepistemiad,’ which was to include a university and a system of schools of all grades, and a dozen years