d. Hence, notwithstanding the
improved condition of all other classes of buildings, general
dilapidation was the fate of these. Industry, and the increasing
pecuniary ability which it creates, had given comfort, neatness, and
even elegance to private dwellings. Public spirit had erected commodious
and costly churches. Counties, though largely taxed, had yet
uncomplainingly paid for handsome and spacious court-houses and public
offices. Humanity had been at work, and had made generous and noble
provision for the pauper, the blind, the deaf and dumb, the insane.
Even jails and houses of correction--the receptacles of felons and other
offenders against the laws of God and man--had in many instances been
transformed, by the more enlightened spirit of the age, into comfortable
and healthful residences. The Genius of Architecture, as if she had made
provision for all mankind, extended her sheltering care over the brute
creation. Better stables were provided for cattle; better folds for
sheep; and even the unclean beasts felt the improving hand of reform.
But, in the mean while, the school-houses, to which the children should
have been wooed by every attraction, were suffered to go where age and
the elements would carry them.

"In 1837, not one third of the public school-houses in Massachusetts
would have been considered tenantable by any decent family out of the
poor-house or in it. As an inducement to neatness and decency, children
were sent to a house whose walls and floors were indeed painted, but
they were painted all too thickly by smoke and filth; whose benches and
doors were covered with carved work, but they were the gross and obscene
carvings of impure hands; whose vestibule, after the Oriental fashion,
was converted into a veranda, but the metamorphosis which changed its
architectural style consisted in laying it bare of its outer covering.
The modesty and chastity of the sexes, at their tenderest age, were to
be cultivated and cherished in places which oftentimes were as destitute
of all suitable accommodation as a camp or a caravan. The brain was to
be worked amid gases that stupefied it. The virtues of generosity and
forbearance were to be acquired where sharp discomfort and pain tempt
each one to seize more than his own share of relief, and thus to
strengthen every selfish propensity.

"At the time referred to, the school-houses in Massachusetts were an
opprobrium to the state; and if there be any one who think