strated, resisted; but they are combined together, and feel that in union is their only strength. The evil spirit prevailed. A committee was appointed to consider my Report. A part of the labor fell into the worst hands. After working at the task all summer, they sent forth, on the 1st of September, a pamphlet of a hundred and fifty-four pages, which I send you, and leave you to judge of its character. I was then just finishing my Annual Abstract, a copy of which I send you, and which I commend to your attention for its extraordinary merits. As soon as the preparation of the Abstract was complete, which was my recreation during the hot days of summer, I wrote a Reply to the Boston Masters.""

This was the inception of the well-known contest, of which many interesting particulars appear in succeeding pages of the Life.

Mr. Mann was almost unequalled in his capacity for unremitting labor. He could "toil terribly." Says his biographer,

"During all his educational life, Mr. Mann had never allowed himself one day of pure recreation. If he made a visit to a friend, some educational errand was sure to lie in ambush, or some plea to be entered for the furtherance of his cherished plans. He had not the art of lying fallow, and thus gathering new strength for labor. His love of children was the only natural outlet for his native hilarity; and this blessed resource was all that saved him when the outside world seemed bent upon harassing him. He never could turn his back upon them: others had to defend him from their loving inroads, hunt them in his study, and pick them off his writing-desk, and out of the back of his chair, where they would be found perched."

Of Mr. Mann's career in Congress, to which he was nominated in March and elected in April, 1848, as the immediate successor of John Quincy Adams, we shall say little. The principal points of interest in that career are well known; the Webster controversy, the contests on the Texas boundary, the Wilmot proviso, and the Fugitive-slave Bill, being the most prominent. Of the letters written at that time, we are told:

66

Many remarks upon Mr. Webster are published in these letters, because the spirit in which Mr. Mann held up his testimony against

him is often misrepresented. In his subsequent life, he often said, that, if he had never done any thing else purely for the love of truth and his country, the course he had pursued in regard to Mr. Webster had the sanction of his later conscience and judgment; that he acted consciously against his own immediate interests; and that society would finally justify him, though he never expected justice from the men who followed so closely in Mr. Webster's footsteps in sacrificing the cause of freedom and truth for party, or political or personal considerations.

"On the day when he left home to take his first letter against Mr. Webster to the printer, he said, 'I am going to do the most reckless thing, on my own account, which I have ever done, in publishing this letter. A thousand of the most prominent men in Massachusetts will never speak to me again. But I must do it; and I shall probably follow it up with more.'"

It is instructive and encouraging to read the record of this Congress, so apparently given over to the very spirit of darkness, passing act after act, which, to the small band of loyal antislavery men, seemed to "put back the cause of freedom half a century," and contrast it with the record of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congresses, just closed, and which has been so admirably summed up by Senator Wilson.

While Mr. Mann was performing his duties in Congress with his accustomed zeal and devotion, he was not unmindful of his first love. For a season he retained the duties of his Secretaryship, and was in constant correspondence with teachers and others on educational matters; occasionally delivering lectures before associations of young men, which gained for him the warmest encomiums of friends and strangers.

As early as May, 1852, overtures were made to him with. reference to the Presidency of Antioch College; and, on the 15th of September following, he was chosen President of that Institution; being the same day also nominated for Governor of Massachusetts, by a convention of the "Free Democracy," assembled at Lowell.

It is impossible to approach this period of Mr. Mann's life without sadness and pain. The sacrifice of personal comfort,

and of the society of cherished friends; disappointment in the condition of matters at his new field of labor; discouraging apathy among the responsible friends of the college; personal opposition from some of the officers of the institution; the almost incredibly low tone of society, and the vulgar, not to say boorish, habits and manners of many of those with whom he was thrown in daily contact; and, finally, the deplorable financial failure of the enterprise, just when all the other obstacles were nearly surmounted,-form a burden of discouragements, painful even to read of, disheartening to the most sanguine and buoyant temperament, insupportable by any one of Mr. Mann's organization. It is no wonder he sank under it.

We make a few brief extracts from this part of the biography, to illustrate the various drawbacks under which the enterprise was prosecuted :

...

"The ambitious brick towers of Antioch College were the first objects to be seen on approaching the spot, and its unfinished aspect was symbolical of the unripe condition of all its affairs. . . . The stumps of the trees still remained standing at the very threshold of the college. No house had been built for his accommodation, as had been promised; nor had he received any intimation of the fact. No provision had even been made for a temporary residence of ten persons. It was long before the college-building was put into comfortable order. It was a year before any provision was made to furnish fresh water to the students, who were obliged to walk a quarter of a mile with their pitchers to procure a draught of the clear article. . . . Many cold weeks elasped, after the opening of the college, on the 5th of October, before the stoves arrived which were to warm either the main college-building, or the close dormitories of the students (ventilation having been entirely ignored in the structure). . . . Mr. Mann persisted in presiding over the common table, hoping by his presence to give a better tone to the manners of the young people, which, by all indications, would otherwise have disfigured the establishment. . . . His presence insured order and decency at the public tables; and for this end he continued to deprive himself and family, for the first year, of the luxury of any private life, a measure of which he might have enjoyed through the privilege of a private

table.

"But he could not prevent the Ohio pigs from walking through the dining-room, as there were no fences around the college-buildings, no doors to the hall, and no appointed homes for the animals. Water stood over shoes between the main college-building and the dininghall (where there is a covered arcade in the picture), so deep that boards floated on it. . . . The disaffection of the superintendent still delayed the building of the college-manse; and his uncomfortable quarters, the self-denial he practised about personal comforts (for only in the privacy of his own bed-chamber would he partake of a little food that he could digest, furtively prepared in an inconvenient manner), the absorption of every moment of his time (for no waking hour was his own), and the anxiety he began to feel lest the institution would become bankrupt, proved too much for Mr. Mann; and, towards the end of the first year, he was laid upon a bed of suffering, from which only his iron resolution finally roused him. . . . The seats at the tables were round, four-legged stools; and Mr. Mann. would not have a chair for himself, even after some ladies of the teaching corps ventured upon that innovation for their own accommodation, and at their own expense. . . . Many laughable incidents growing out of the primitive simplicity of log-cabin life at the West, made the Eastern residents in this hitherto uncultured region realize the difference between the two states of society. Mr. Mann, in his Western lecturing tours, had often slept in the one apartment of a log-cabin (the owner worth, perhaps, a hundred thousand dollars), in which a row of beds were turned down at night to accommodate the household, guest, and all: therefore he was not alarmed when a very demure young lady not particularly young, but a student of the college came to make the request that she might make up a bed on the floor of her apartment for her brother-in-law, who had come to visit her."

The theological composition of the Board of Managers added to his embarrassment:

"The body of the Christian denomination was represented by men of limited education and narrow views, but a little in advance of the general ignorance, and who cared more for the advancement of their sect than for the advancement of learning and virtue. Mr. Mann accepted ignorance as one of the evils he must necessarily combat. He did not despise it: he only pitied it, and bent every energy to removing it. But he had no respect for bigotry."

The low state of morality among the students was a source of infinite anxiety to Mr. Mann; and his labors in public and private, to elevate and strengthen the moral sense of his young friends, could only have been performed by one who felt deeply his personal accountability for every moment of his time:

(6 Many a student was dismissed from his institution for the vice of persistent lying, — not always publicly, but winnowed out through private admonition to friends; for that was the most hopeless form of youthful vice in his eyes, and he did not think it right to allow its contaminating influence in such a community. Our national vice of intemperance he treated like a physician, and shared with his students the vigils held over the few cases that came to an alarming crisis in the institution."

The financial condition of the college, meanwhile, was deplorable; and the various letters of Mr. Mann show how heavily the burden of this perplexity pressed upon him. In a letter of Oct. 16, 1857, he remarks,

"There must be some reason that draws so many students here, notwithstanding the horrid pecuniary death we have been dying for four years, and notwithstanding every student who came was not without some reason to believe that the college would tumble down on his head. .. . I am living on short allowance; have not had a cent from the college for a year and a half; and it costs me about two thousand dollars a year to keep up my 'public house.""

The "reason" referred to, it is not difficult to surmise. Indeed, the insight afforded by these letters into the working condition of the institution is convincing as to its admirable management. Never was so great a success coupled with so mortifying and disgraceful a failure.

The following extract from a letter to Rev. S. J. May, Feb. 27, 1858, is in pleasant contrast to the condition of things a few years before, and indicates the effect of Mr. Mann's paternal watchfulness and care:

"On the east side of our grounds, and immediately adjoining them, is a farm of four hundred acres, with garden, vineyard, and orchard of twenty or thirty in addition. On the north-west, Judge Mills has a large flower and fruit garden. On the south-west, a hundred and