=The Educational Suggestions and Achievements of Mann.=--In surveying his educational positions, we find Mann’s foremost proposition was that education should be universal and free. Girls should be trained as well as boys, and the poor should have the same opportunities as the rich. Public schools should furnish education of such a quality that the wealthy would not regard private institutions as superior. This universal education, however, should have as its chief aim moral character and social efficiency, and not mere erudition, culture, and accomplishments. And morality, he felt, would not be accomplished by inculcating sectarian doctrines. Mann was, however, mainly a practical, rather than a theoretical reformer, and to the material side of education he gave serious attention. He declared that school buildings should be well constructed and sanitary. This matter seemed to him so important that he wrote a special report upon the subject during his first year in office. He carefully discussed the proper plans for rooms, ventilation, lighting, seating, and other schoolhouse features, and insisted that the inadequate and squalid conditions which existed should be improved. As to methods, he maintained that instruction should be based upon scientific principles, and not upon authority and tradition. He advocated the word method of reading, in the place of the uneconomical, artificial, and ineffective method of the alphabet, and the Pestalozzian object methods and oral instruction were introduced by him. He held that the work should be guided by able teachers, who had been trained in a normal school, and should be imparted in a spirit of mildness and kindness through an understanding of child nature. In the matter of the studies to be pursued, Mann was inclined to be exceedingly practical. In discussing educational values, he failed to see any reason “why algebra, a branch which not one man in a thousand ever has occasion to use in the business of life, should be studied by more than twenty-three hundred pupils, and bookkeeping, which every man, even the day laborer, should understand, should be attended to by only a little more than half that number.” Similarly, he holds that of all subjects, save the rudiments, physiology should receive the most attention. [Sidenote: Doubled appropriations for public education; increased salaries, length of the school year, and the number of high schools;] [Sidenote: and effected other reforms.]