aining and instruction if we
consider that, in its absence, every individual will be educated by
circumstances. Let it be borne in mind, then, that all the children in
every community will be educated somewhere and somehow; and that it
devolves upon citizens and parents to determine whether the children of
the present generation shall receive their training in the
_school-house_ or in the _streets_; and if in the former, whether in
good or poor schools.

In the discharge of my official duties in this state, I had occasion to
visit two counties in 1846 in which there were no organized common
schools.[30] They were not, however, without places of instruction, for
in the shire town of each of those counties there were a billiard-room,
bar-rooms, and bowling-alleys. I was forcibly impressed with the remark
of an Indian chief residing in one of those counties. As he was passing
along the streets one day, he discovered a second bowling-alley in
process of erection. He paused, and, surveying it attentively, remarked
to those at work upon it as follows: "You have here another long
building going up rapidly; and," he added, "_is this the place where our
children are to be educated?_" Such keen and well-merited rebuke rarely
falls from human lips. Those two bowling-alleys, with their
bars--indispensable appendages--were thronged from six o'clock in the
morning until past midnight, six days in the week. They were, moreover,
the very places where many of the youth of that village were receiving
their education. And who were their teachers? Idlers, tipplers,
gamblers, profane persons, Sabbath-breakers. Mark well this truth: _as
is the teacher, so will be the school_. Those pupils will graduate, it
may be, at our poor-houses, at our county jails, or at the state
penitentiary. These debasing and corrupting appendages of civilization
spent not all their influence upon the white man; and this is what gave
pungency to the withering satire of the chief. They were at once working
the ruin of the red man and of his pale neighbor.

[30] Common schools have since been organized in both of those counties.

The rudest nations or individuals can not be said to be wholly without
education. Even the wildest savage is taught by his superiors not only
the best mode of procuring food and shelter known to his race, but also
the most adroit manner of defending himself and destroying his enemy.
But we use the term in a higher, broader, and more