walks of life than
from the higher, are placed in a jury box to decide upon almost every
possible question of human interests. The jury decides your fortune,
your reputation. The jury says whether you live or die. Go into a court
of justice. Are they light matters which those twelve men are to
determine? Look at the anxious faces of those whose estates, whose good
name, whose worldly all hangs upon the intelligence of those twelve men,
or of any one of them. What assurance have you, save that which comes
from popular education, that these men will understand and do their
duty? Who would like to trust his legal rights or his personal safety to
the verdict of a jury of Neapolitan lazzaroni?

In a few short years, the idle boys who are now prowling about the
streets and alleys of our towns, the wharf-rats of our cities, will be a
part of our jurymen. Is it of no consequence to me, whether their minds
shall be early trained and disciplined, so that they will be capable of
following a train of argument, or of comprehending a statement of facts?
How is it possible to administer justice with any degree of fairness and
efficiency, where the majority of those who are to constitute the
jurymen and the witnesses are stolidly ignorant? By common law, every
man has a right to be tried by his peers. Let law then provide that
those shall, in some substantial sense, be my peers, on whose voice my
all in life may depend.

But let us recur once more to the economical part of the argument. When
a community is taxed for the support of common schools, the question
naturally rises among the taxpayers, Is the system worth the cost? Does
the community, by the diffusion of knowledge and education, gain enough
to counterbalance the large expense which such education involves? Even
if this question could not be answered in the affirmative, it would not
follow that common schools should be dispensed with. Common schools are
needed as the best and cheapest protection against the crimes incident
to an ignorant and degraded population. Common schools are right and
proper, because without them the majority of those created in the image
of God will never attain to that noble manhood which is their rightful
inheritance. But the argument will receive additional force, if it can
be shown that general education increases the wealth of the community.

That education does have this effect is evident, I think, from two
independent lines of argument. First,