ganized
capacity, will do nothing, let individuals do what they can. In such
cases, let those who appreciate the advantages of education, concert
measures for the establishment of schools and the employment of
teachers, and for inducing parents who are indifferent to send their
children. By these private efforts, the community may be gradually
awakened to the importance of the subject, and so be induced to take it
up on their own account. But private benevolence is not sufficient for
so great a work. Private benevolence besides is apt to be fitful. It is
at best subject to interruption by death and by reverses of fortune,
while the cause is one which especially demands steadiness and
continuity. The means for educating a community or a city should no more
be subject to interruption, than the means of lighting it, or of
supplying it with water.

The argument for depending upon private enterprise for devising and
providing the means for popular education, would apply equally well to
matters of police, and to the protection of property. The strong-armed
and the sagacious can take care of themselves. The stout-hearted and the
good, by due concert and combination, could keep criminals in some
check, even in a country where there were no courts of justice, or
prisons, or detective police. But this is not the ordinary or the best
mode of accomplishing the end, nor could it in any case be thoroughly
efficient. The restraint and punishment of crime belong to society as a
whole, in its sovereign capacity. To the same society belongs the duty
of seeing that its members do not fall into degrading ignorance and
vice. God, in ordaining human society, had something higher in view than
merely providing for the punishment of crime. Our Heavenly Father would
have his children raised to the full enjoyment of their privileges as
social and rational beings, and he seems to have established society for
this very end, among others, that there may be an agency and a machinery
adequate and fitted to drag even the unwilling out of the mire into
which they have fallen. Without such an interposition on the part of
society as a whole, the work will not be done. The mass of the people
will remain in ignorance in every community, in which the community as
such does not provide the means of education and general enlightenment.

It is often urged against common schools, that they tend to impair
parental obligation. Let us look this objection fairly in