Boone continues: “Incompetent teachers were fearful, politicians carped, and general conservatism hindered” by the advances of Mr. Mann. “Much was to be accomplished, also, within the school. Teachers had to be improved, interest awakened, methods rationalized, and the whole adjusted to the available resources. Moreover, school architecture had to be studied. All this Mr. Mann did.” How great was the opportunity which the religious sects of America had missed! Some of the things which were accomplished in the next few years are thus reported: “A system of normal schools was originated. The annual appropriation for schools was doubled; two million dollars expended on houses and furniture; the number of women teachers increased; institutes introduced and systematized; school libraries multiplied; education provided for the dependent, and young offending classes, and the first compulsory school law of the State enacted.” [Sidenote: Henry Bernard] Henry Bernard, a young lawyer of Connecticut, did for his State a work similar to that of Horace Mann in Massachusetts. He was a man of keen insight, and struck at the root of many evils. Finding that public money was misapplied, and many primary children neglected, he went about to work a reform. “Teachers were awakened, associations for mutual improvement were formed.... He established an educational periodical,” wholly at his own expense. In 1843 this strong-hearted, level-headed man was called by the State of Rhode Island to straighten out the tangles in her educational system. From this beginning has grown the public school system as seen to-day. It is interwoven in the meshes of our national history from Boston to San Francisco, and from St. Paul to New Orleans. [Sidenote: Reaction in colleges] The colleges had made necessary the academies—classical preparatory schools; and these sent forth men who modeled the high schools after the academic course. The Christian colleges set the pace to begin with; then, finding themselves outrun in the race, to meet the needs, the nineteenth century sees a gradual but none the less decided change in their courses of instruction. Here are a few of the changes, with the reasons for them. Says Boone:— “The current and recent magnifying of the humanities, the growing recognition of an altruistic and co-operative spirit in civil and social and political life, the increasing complexity of social forces, new aspects of government, the fundamental oneness of all life, and sequent idea of the solidarity of human society, have created for the student new lines of investigation.”[165] How true! How wide the separation between the ideal held before the early Harvard and that of the Harvard of to-day. “The sequent idea of the solidarity of human society” as a new line of investigation for students, seems almost like mockery when we see the fundamental principles of the government loosening, and ready to crumble on the application of some unexpected force.