Boston: Printed by C.C.P. Moody, 1866. First edition. Presentation copy, inscribed by reformer and abolitionist Rev. Samuel J. May at top of front wrapper, to Edward Smith: "Mr Edward Smith / with the sincere regards / of Saml. J. May". 12mo. 59 pp. Original stiff printed wrappers, small stain on front wrapper, short tear in lower spine; all edges trimmed.

A fine presentation copy of this pamphlet, inscribed by reformer and abolitionist Rev. Samuel J. May, memorializing the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the first state-sponsored Normal School in America. Printing Rev. May's impassioned keynote speech before graduates and educators of the Normal Schools, where he celebrates education as the essential force of democracy and urges the adoption of universal suffrage: "In our democracies, the lowliest citizen is, as much as the loftiest, the source of the powers which the governments wield. Nay, there is no one so lowly that he may not be raised to the highest office in the State or the Republic, be called not only to confer but to administer the power of the nation. Under our form of government, it is then nothing less than indispensable that all the people should be well educated, diligently trained to respect the power, by which they are governed, (although that power emanates from themselves) because it can have no vital force in the body politic, if it have none in the constituency of that body. No members of a self-governing State do or can contribute aught to the strength of the government, except so far as they have the ability and disposition to govern themselves. Consequently a far higher degree of moral as well as intellectual culture is needed in all the people of a democracy, than in the subjects of a monarch or of an aristocracy..."

The first public normal school in the United States was founded in 1839 in Framingham, Massachusetts, as the Lexington Normal School (current day Framingham State University). Modeled on the French École Normale, or model school, it trained educators for teaching in public schools. Throughout his life, Rev. Samuel J. May was intimately involved in educational reform in the United States. He founded the Brooklyn, Connecticut Lyceum, served on that town's school committee, and sponsored the first state-wide common school convention in Connecticut in 1827. Under the aegis of educational reformer Horace Mann (known as the "Father of American Education"), who founded Lexington Normal School, May served as its principal in the early 1840s, where he instituted educational reforms and oversaw the increase in the student population.