dawning. It is not strange, therefore, that--while the railroads
were feeling their way from town to town and across the prairies,
while water-power and steam-power were multiplying man's
productivity, indicating that the old days were gone forever--
many curious dreams of a new order of things should be dreamed,
nor that among them some should be ridiculous, some fantastic,
and some unworthy, nor that, as the futility of a universal
social reform forced itself upon the dreamers, they merged the
greater in the lesser, the general in the particular, and sought
an outlet in espousing some specific cause or attacking some
particular evil.

Those movements which had their inspiration in a genuine
humanitarianism achieved great good. Now for the first time the
blind, the deaf, the dumb, and the insane were made the object of
social solicitude and communal care. The criminal, too, and the
jail in which he was confined remained no longer utterly
neglected. Men of the debtor class were freed from that medieval
barbarism which gave the creditor the right to levy on the person
of his debtor. Even the public schools were dragged out of their
lethargy. When Horace Mann was appointed secretary of the newly
created Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, a new day
dawned for American public schools.

While these and other substantial improvements were under way,
the charlatan and the faddist were not without their
opportunities or their votaries. Spirit rappings beguiled or awed
the villagers; thousands of religious zealots in 1844 abandoned
their vocations and, drawing on white robes, awaited expectantly
the second coming of Christ; every cult from free love to