At the organization of the ^Massachusetts Board of Ed- ucation, June 29, 1837, Horace Mann was elected its sec- retary, and, as such, he served for eleven years. He now gave up all other business, withdrew from politics, and devoted his whole time to the cause of education, intro- ducing normal schools and paid committees. During these eleven years he worked (iftcen liours a day, helil teachers' conventions, gave Icclures, and conducted a large correspondence. In 184:! lie made a visit to edu- cational establishments in Europe. His Keport was re- printed both in England and America. In 1848 he was elected to Congress, as the successor of ex-president John Quincy Adams, whose example he followed in en- ergetic opposition to the extension of slaverv. Mr. Mann's years in Congress were tliose stormy cloud- gathering years whose records are labelled ''Fillmore." '•Fugitive-Slave Law," "New Jlexico and California." Staunch and steady he stood, a man of iron, in those days of compromise and ])olitical corru])tiou. Hating slavery through everv lil)rc of his soul, he liad his weaji- on drawn whenever and wherever its crest arose. His
great abilities as a statesman are evinced in his letters written at this time, foreshadowing the troubles of 1861- 65. His first speech in Congress was in advocacy of the right and duty of the national government to ex- clude slavery from the territories. In a letter dated Dec, 1848, he says on this'subject, " I think the country is to experience serious times. Interference with slav- ery will excite civil commotion at the South. Still, it is best to interfere. Now is the time to see whether the United States is a rope of sand or a band of steel." In another letter, dated January, 1850, he says, "Dark clouds overhang the future, anil that is not all; they are fuU of lightning." Again, " I really think that if we insist upon passing the Wilmot Proviso for the ter- ritories, that the South — a part of them — will rebel. But / would pass it, rebellion or no rebellion. / consider no evil so great as the extension of slavery.^'' After having spent two terms in Congress, we find ]Mr. Mann in 1853 embarking into a new and somewhat formidable enter- prise— the establishment of a college at the West to be open to both sexes, and to be founded and conducted on the educational principles which he had espoused in Massachusetts, and which we shall presently pass in re- view. The experiment made here for the co-education of the sexes proved a success, and in our own day the admission of j'oung ladies to our best and highest schools is likely to be commendatory of Mr. Mann's enterprise in 1853. The labors and anxieties of this position at Antioch College, however, proved at length too much for his health, never strong, and now undermined by a life of the most intense and unremitting activity. The fiery soul consumed the bodj' at last, Aug. 2, 1859.
Mami on the Relation of Religion to Education. — IMr. Mann had been reared under the infiuence of the Cal- vinistlc faith. While yet a youth he had cherished an aversion to this orthodox belief, because, as he tells us, it had taught him to look upon God as " Infinite Ma- lignity personified." When, at the mature age of forty, just as he entered on his work as an educator, he fell in with Combe's Constitution of Man, he at once became a warm admirer of the theological, psj-chological, or an- thropological school of which Mr. George Combe was the distinguished teacher. Education has certainly no less to do with the conscience and heart than with the understanding, as "most of our relations to our fellow- men, for which education is to prepare us, grow out of our relations to God ;" it therefore should derive its knowledge from the holy Scriptures, and make these, indeed, the corner-stone. Mann, however, held that it should depend for its guidance on the lights of natural religion. He came forward now to assert t\vxi''''natural religion stands as pre-eminent over revealed religion as the deepest experience over the lightest hearsay," and proposed to substitute, for the Christian infiuence which I pervaded our whole educational institution, a system of I "philosophical and moral doctrines," the prevalence of ' which would, in his view, "produce a new earth at least, if not a new lieavcn." Believing what is called the "evangelical faith," at that time ruling New England, to be in its influence derogatory to the character of God, and dwarfing and enslaving to the mind of man, he con- ceived it to be his task to vindicate the former and to emancipate the latter. Especially he conceived it his mission to overcome the "foul spirit of orthodoxy," so far as it entered the domain of the public schools, and this he believed to be " the greatest discovery ever made by man." "Other social organizations," he says, " are cura- tive and remedial; this is a preventive and antidote. They come to heal diseases and wounds; this is to make the physical and moral frame invulnerable to them. Let the conniion scliool be exjianded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is sus- ceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would Itecomc obsolete — the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged — men would walk more safely by day — every pillow would be more inviting by night — property, life, autl character held by a stronger tenure ;