The Russellville Democrat

PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND IMMIGRATION.

Public schools will never be a complete success until there is a larger and denser population. It is impossible to make effective any system of public schools in a very thinly populated district, and all the attempts of legislators to establish schools in such places have failed. It is only where the ranks are closed up that the fight against ignorance is successful. For this reason, if no other, we should be willing and anxious, too, for immigration and near neighbors. The sooner the range and scrub stock are surrendered for pastures, improved stock and school-houses the better. If every acre of land in the state, not reserved for timber, were used for pastures or for cultivation, all would be near neighbors, and the establishment and support of public and private schools would be easy. As it is, it is difficult in many portions of the state, and in some parts entirely impracticable. For these and many other good and sufficient reasons, we welcome to our state immigration from every state and every clime.

-State Grange.

The editor of the Grange gets at the very gist of the question of popular education in the above well digested remarks, and has sounded the key note from which our legislators who are trying to do something for the common school system may get some profitable ideas. There can be no free public schools where there is no children, and no system which can be devised will be a success where it takes a scope of territory often times from five to eight miles square to supply twenty-five or thirty school children. To make an efficient system of free public schools there are these two things essential and absolutely indispensable, to-wit: an ample school fund, and a sufficiently dense population to fill up schools within a radius of a convenient distance from the public school buildings. Where there are but few tax-payers, and they owning only property and lands enough to make but small tax lists, it is impossible to create a school fund of any worth without making taxes onerous and oppressive. We must have more values and more taxpayers. Then we can have a school fund. The same reasoning holds good when it comes to the question of good public highways. We can never have good highways until our country is settled up. No road law that can be framed will accomplish it. Good highways and good schools will be found in Arkansas when we get a larger population and more values. Values will come with immigration, and immigration will create values. Wise legislation and generous appropriations in the interests of immigration will go further toward giving us good schools and good highways, than all the road and school laws that can be enacted. If we can get the population and have the latent values of our State developed, there will be no trouble about good schools and good highways. Will our General Assembly study this phase of the matter?