ANTHONY TROLLOPE ON THE SUPERIORITY OF AMERICAN FREE SCHOOLS COMPARED TO THOSE IN ENGLAND (1862)

Abstract

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) followed most of his English predecessors who wrote about their American travels in attributing the chief glory of our country to our provision for universal free education. He wrote1: The one thing in which, as far as my judgment goes, the people of the United States have excelled us Englishmen, so as to justify them in taking to themselves praise which we cannot take to ourselves or refuse to them, is the matter of education; and unrivalled population, wealth, and inteffigence have been the results; and with these, looking at the whole masses of the people, I think I am justified in saying, unrivalled comfort and happiness. It is not that you, my reader, to whom, in this matter of education, fortune and your parents have probably been bountiful, would have been more happy in New York than in London. It is not that I, who, at any rate, can read and write, have cause to wish that I had been an American. But it is this: if you and I can count up in a day all those on whom our eyes may rest, and learn the circumstances of their lives, we shall be driven to conclude that nine tenths of that number would have had a better life as Americans than they can have in their spheres as Englishmen. If a man can forget his own miseries in his journeyings, and think of the people he comes to see rather than of himself, I think he will find himself driven to admit that education has made life for the million in the Northern States better than life for the million is with us.