rs to bestow on us their miserable crumbs. And what is wanting to
restore us to our station among our confederates? Not more money from
the people. Enough has been raised by them, and appropriated to this
very object. It is that it should be employed understandingly, and for
their greatest good. That good requires, that while they are instructed
in general, competently to the common business of life, others should
employ their genius with necessary information to the useful arts, to
inventions for saving labor and increasing our comforts, to nourishing
our health, to civil government, military science, &c.

Would it not have a good effect for the friends of the University
to take the lead in proposing and effecting a practical scheme of
elementary schools? to assume the character of the friends, rather than
the opponents of that object? The present plan has appropriated to the
primary schools forty-five thousand dollars for three years, making one
hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. I should be glad to know if
this sum has educated one hundred and thirty-five poor children? I doubt
it much. And if it has, they have cost us one thousand dollars a
piece for what might have been done with thirty dollars. Supposing the
literary revenue to be sixty thousand dollars, I think it demonstrable,
that this sum, equally divided between the two objects, would amply
suffice for both. One hundred counties, divided into about twelve wards
each, on an average, and a school in each ward of perhaps ten
children, would be one thousand and two hundred schools, distributed
proportionably over the surface of the State. The inhabitants of each
ward, meeting together (as when they work on the roads), building
good log-houses for their school and teacher, and contributing for his
provisions, rations of pork, beef, and corn, in the proportion, each of
his other taxes, would thus lodge and feed him without feeling it;
and those of them who are able, paying for the tuition of their own
children, would leave no call on the public fund but for the tuition
fee of, here and there, an accidental pauper, who would still be fed and
lodged with his parents. Suppose this fee ten dollars, and three
hundred dollars apportioned to a county on an average (more or less duly
proportioned), would there be thirty such paupers for every county? I
think not. The truth is, that the want of common education with us is
not from our poverty, but from want of an orde