These statements were scarcely carried out in fact; in Pennsylvania educational advantages were few, and among some classes education was sorely hampered. The Quakers did not encourage absolute illiteracy, but they thought knowledge of the "three R's" was enough; they distinctly disapproved of any extended scholarship, as it fostered undue pride and provoked idleness. The Germans were worse; their own historians, the Calvinist and Lutheran preachers, Schlatter and Muhlenberg, are authority; there were among them a few schools of low grade; but the introduction of the public school system among the Germans was resisted by indignation meetings and litigation. The Tunkers degenerated so that they did not desire a membership of educated persons, and would have liked to destroy all books but religious ones. It was said by these German settlers that schooling made boys lazy and dissatisfied on the farms, and that religion would suffer by too much learning. As Bayard Taylor puts it in his _Pennsylvania Farmer_:-- "Book learning gets the upper hand and work is slow and slack, And they that come long after us will find things gone to wrack." School-teachers in the middle and southern colonies were frequently found in degraded circumstances; many of them were redemptioners and exported convicts. I have frequently noted such newspaper advertisements as this from the _Maryland Gazette_:-- "Ran away: A Servant man who followed the occupation of a Schoolmaster, much given to drinking and gambling." So universal was drunkenness among schoolmasters that a chorus of colonial "gerund-grinders" might sing in Goldsmith's words:-- "Let schoolmasters puzzle their brains With grammar and nonsense and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning." [Illustration: handwritten note] Scotland furnished the best and the largest number of schoolmasters to the colonies. The first pedagogue of New Amsterdam was one Adam Roelantsen, and he had a checkered career. His name appears with frequency on the court records of the little town both as plaintiff and defendant. He was as active in slandering his neighbors as they were in slandering him; though, as Miss Van Vechten observes, "It is hard to see what fiction worse than truth could have been invented about him." In spite of the fact that "people did not speak well of him," he married well. But his misdemeanors continued and he was finally sentenced to be flogged. We may contrast the legal records of this gentleman's shortcomings with his duties as set forth in his commission, one of which was "to set others a good example as becometh a devout, pious, and worthy consoler of the sick, church clerk, precentor, and schoolmaster."