never-failing ally of despotism. We
have organized and successfully fought a crusade against tyranny; we are
now in the full tide of our crusade against slavery; let us have one
more, organized and efficient, against ignorance, that the fruit of our
former victories be not lost to us for lack of wisdom to use them
aright.

That the people who suffer most from want of knowledge should disdain it
is but natural. To see the need of teaching, men must be taught. It is
this very ignorance which is the strong buttress against education.
Ignorance propagates itself. It can be subdued only by force or tact,
not by argument. But for men who have attained by the help of their
education whatever reputation they possess to affect to question its
importance is to spurn the ladder by which they have mounted to
eminence. We are sometimes almost tempted to suspect the existence of a
petty jealousy in members of the learned professions. It would seem as
if a small fear were indulged lest a wider diffusion of knowledge and a
more thorough culture among the farming classes should detract from the
supremacy of others. There is certainly, among some writers, a leaning
towards a continuance of present abuses for which it is difficult to
account. The shrewdness of the plain farmer is pitted against the
science of the scholar, to the entire discomfiture of the latter. But
would the plain farmer's shrewdness be at all diminished by educating
the plain farmer? Would his sharp sense be blunted by being expressed
with some partial subjection to grammatical forms? Would his observation
be any less close for being trained? Would his reasoning be any less
profitable by being wisely directed than by running at hap-hazard? Would
it not be more economical to strengthen and polish his powerful weapons,
and give them honest work to do, than to leave them rough and rusty from
disuse, and only brought out at long intervals to hew and hack devices
for walking in darkness? If education is not the foe of legal,
mechanical, polemic, nor forensic acuteness, why should it be hostile to
any?

No lover of his country, who brings to this view the same clearness and
sense which he takes to political or personal plans, but must hail as an
omen of good the efforts now making throughout the North in behalf of
agriculture and education. It is a cause for proud and grateful
gratulation and congratulation, that our government is so wise and
strong as to look through all