The Americans certainly made tremendous, continuous, and heartbreakingly genuine efforts to
become enlightened.' Even more than i9thcentury Britain, America was a country of conscious self-betterment. The state was trying to make itself better; the people were trying too, not for want of urging. The great orator Daniel Webster took the occasion of the unveiling of the Bunker Hill monument in Boston (June 17, 1825) to intone:Our proper business is improvement. Let
our age be the age of improvement. In a day of peace, let us advance the arts of people and the
works of peace.' The `works of peace' were proceeding all the time. Boston had gas street-
lighting in 1822, almost as soon as London. It came to New York in 1823, to Philadelphia in
- But Philadelphia was ahead with piped water, getting it in 1799. By 1822 the Fairmount
Waterworks had brought piped water to the entire city. This was amazing even by the standards
in England, regarded then as the world pioneer in municipal utilities. Moreover, this magnificent
waterworks, in the best classical architecture, expanded from the banks of the Schuylkill, and its
grounds embraced a huge area of the country, and in order to preserve it from pollution
Philadelphia ultimately created the largest urban park in the world, in the process preserving for
posterity all the splendid riverside villas we have already described. There were, to be sure, early
signs of skulduggery in the provision of municipal services. Aaron Burr's Manhattan Water
Company (1799), the first to build a reservoir in New York, was in reality a front for an unlawful
bank competing with Alexander Hamilton's Bank of New York (now the Chase-Manhattan). But,
at this stage anyway, most services, public and private, were honest, competitive, and, by world
standards, go-ahead. New York got its first omnibuses only a year after Paris and the same year
as London, 1828-the first line was Wall Street-Greenwich Village. Philadelphia had buses three
years later. America was also quick to imitate Britain's penny post, knocking down the steep
prices the generous President Jefferson paid to 5 cents for half an ounce delivered at up to 300
miles (1846). Open competition was driving down prices relentlessly: thus the first penny
newspaper dates from 1840, an amazing price by European (even British) standards at that time."
There was no doubt about the determination with which 'enlightenment' was pursued in the
field of education, at all levels of American society. Since the colonial period, America had
rejoiced in the highest rate of adult literacy in the world, higher even than Germany's. This was
due primarily to the school reformers in the big cities. Horace Mann's work in Boston we have
already noted, in the context of teaching religion. In 1806 the Public School Society of New
York introduced the Lancaster system from England, in whichpupil teachers' or monitors were used to give basic instruction to the thousands of new city children. From 1815 the society'smodel system' of public schools got state aid, and when New York State finally took over the
system in 1853 it was providing education for 600,000 children. In the newer states, Ohio for
instance, the sixteenth section of each planned township was devoted to education. But in the
Western states, sheer distance made universal education difficult. In Louisiana the population
density (1860) was only eleven per square mile; in Virginia (including what is now West
Virginia) it was fourteen, by contrast with Massachusetts, where it was 127. Census data show
that by 1840 some 78 percent of the total population was literate (91 percent of the white
population), and this was mainly due to a rise in national school enrollment rates: from 35
percent in 1830 (ages five to nineteen), to 50.4 percent in 1850 and 61.1 percent in 1860. All the
same, there were still 1 million adult illiterates in America in 1850, of whom 500,000 were in the
South. Most of these illiterates were not new immigrants (though that too was a problem,
because of language) but blacks, an early indication of trouble to come.
At the end of the 1760s, America, on the eve of Independence, had nine colleges, or
universities as they were later called. All were denominational, though William and Mary was