t 'the greatest charity which can be shown the poor is to
ensure them the means of obtaining an education.'

This, down to thirty years ago, was the principle of legislation in
Virginia upon the public school question, the State not attempting to
interfere with the authority of parents over their children in the
matter of education, but making an appropriation for the instruction of
the children of the poor. That mischievous wind-bag Lakanal lived in
Mississippi and Louisiana during his exile in America, and it is
possible that his influence may have had something to do with the early
adoption by another southern State, Louisiana, of the general public
school system. However that may be, Louisiana in 1850 spent upon her
public schools three times as much money annually as any of the New
England States, with the result that, out of a native white population
of 186,577, she had in her prisons 240 native white criminals, or 1 in
777 of the whole number, being 'the largest proportion of criminals to
population at that time to be found in America, if not in the world.'
Virginia, out of a native white population of 1,070,395 in 1860, had no
more than 163 native white criminals in her prisons, or 1 in 6,566 of
her native white population.

It is a curious fact, by the way, that but for the fidelity of the
French clergy before 1789, in carrying out the work imposed upon them by
the ordinance of Louis XIV., and commended in the ordinance of the
Bishop of Arras in 1740, two of the most conspicuous actors in the
grotesquely horrible drama of the French Revolution would have starved
to death in the streets of Arras, or grown up there in vagabondage. The
clergy of St.-Vaast in the diocese of Arras found, in 1768, two wretched
urchins thrown upon the world by an unnatural father. One of these,
Maximilian Isidore de Robespierre, was born in 1758; the other, Augustus
Bai Joseph de Robespierre, in 1764. The good priests picked them up,
cared for them, and put them in the way of getting a good education,
which they turned to such purpose that both of them eventually came to
the guillotine in the flower of their years, and amid the cordially
contemptuous execrations of decent people all over the world. One of the
most accomplished public men in Massachusetts told me years ago, that he
was stopped on his way to school one morning in 1794, by a friend of the
family, who bade him run back at once and tell his father the news had
come from E