St. Louis, in August last, said: "It is a very customary declaration to
pronounce that education is the great safeguard of republics against the
decay of virtue and the reign of immorality. Yet the facts can scarcely
bear out the proposition. The highest civilizations, both ancient and
modern, have sometimes been the most flagitious. Nowadays, certainly,
your prime rascals have been educated rascals."

And indeed if we go to Auburn, Sing Sing, and other prisons, and examine
some of the criminals confined there, we will find that there is truth
in the Governor's words.

Do the managers of the Erie Railway lack any kind of intelligence that
could be communicated in a common school? Are not those pests, the
Washington and Albany lobbies, rather _too_ knowing? Had not those
blood-suckers, the shoddy-ites and army contractors, an average common
school education? Do not the "gold rings" and the "whiskey rings" know
how to read and write? Were not Catiline of old, and Aaron Burr and
Benedict Arnold of more recent times, men of intelligence? Were not the
parties to the recent tragedy, two of whom Mr. Beecher united in unholy
wedlock, passable enough in point of merely intellectual cultivation?
Mephistopheles was a person of surprising accomplishments, and the
ablest debates in literature are those which Milton puts in the mouths
of the grand synod of devils in Pandemonium. Byron was a prodigy of
intelligence; but, whether Mrs. Stowe's revolting accusation be true or
not, he was certainly a profligate.

No one, certainly, gifted with ordinary power of observation, will
ascribe crime solely to ignorance, nor will such a one fail to see that
a large class of the most audacious and dangerous offenders of both
sexes are educated, nay, over-educated, according to the Public School
standard.

The Boston Daily _Herald_, of October 20th, published the following as
an editorial article:

"Year after year the Chief of Police publishes his statistics of
prostitution in this city, but how few of the citizens bestow more than
a passing thought upon the misery that they represent! Although these
figures are large enough to make every lover of humanity hang his head
with feelings of sorrow and shame at the picture, we are assured that
they represent but a little, as it were, of the actual licentiousness
that prevails among all classes of society. Within a few months, a
gentleman[F] whose scientific attainments have made his name a househ