that the priest would have. I suspect said
General S. that your ministers are too proud and too lazy. I perceived
his idea was, that a school master, hired to undergo the drudgery of
teaching boys, was too much of an _hireling_ to fill up to the full
the important duties of a teacher; but he judged of them by the
numerous Scotch school masters here and there in Canada, Nova Scotia,
the West India islands and every where else, teaching for money
merely. He did not know that our New England school masters were men
of character, and consequence. Some of our very first men in these
United States, have been teachers of youth. At this present time some
of the sons of some of the first men in Massachusetts are village
school masters; that is, they keep a school in the winter vacations of
the University; and some of them for the first year after leaving
college.

I was much pleased with the general; and have since learnt, that he
was a very worthy and benevolent man; and that he had paid great
attention to the education of youth in Newfoundland; and that it was,
in a degree, his ruling passion.[B] I wish I had then known as much of
our school system, and of our system of public education at our
Universities, as I do now; for I might have gratified his benevolent
disposition by the recital. The ignorance of English gentlemen of the
people of America, and of their education, is indeed surprising as
well as mortifying. By their treatment of us, it is evident they
consider us a sort of white savages, with minds as uncultivated, and
dispositions as ferocious as their own _allies_, with their tomahawks
and scalping knives. After conversing with this worthy Englishman,
about the education of the common people in America, I could not but
say to myself, little do you, good sir, and your haughty, and
unfeeling captain imagine, that there are those among the hundred
miserable men whom you keep confined in the hold of your ship, like so
many Gallipago turtles, and who you allow to suffer for _want of
sufficient food_; little do you think that there are among them those
who have sufficient learning to lay the whole story of their
sufferings before the American and English people; little do you
imagine that the inhumane treatment of men every way as good as
yourselves, is now recording, and will in due time be displayed to
your mortification.

Our sailors, though half starved, confined and broken down by harsh
treatment, always kept up th