e very charter of their liberties! How many, by their
votes, elect men to legislate upon their dearest interests, while they
themselves are unable to read even the proceedings of those legislators
whom they have empowered to act for them!"

In accounting for this lamentable state of things, the committee of the
Convention say, "We seem to forget that first principles are, in
education, all-important principles; that primary schools are the places
where these principles are to be established, and where such direction
will, in all probability, be given to the minds of our children as will
decide their future character in life. Hence the idle, and the profane,
and the drunken, and the ignorant are employed to impart to our children
the first elements of knowledge--are set before them as examples of what
literature and science can accomplish! And hence the profession of
schoolmaster, which should be the most honorable, is but too often a
term of reproach."

That other most unwelcome and dread conclusion, _that existing
provisions for popular education in the United Slates are inadequate to
the requirements of a free people_, is, then, in view of all these
facts, unavoidably forced upon us.

In the name of Christian philanthropy, in the name of patriotism, then,
I inquire whether there is any ground for hope that our free
institutions may be transmitted unimpaired to posterity. "With the
heroes, and sages, and martyrs of the Revolution," to adopt the language
of another, "I believe in the capability of man for self-government, my
whole soul thereto most joyously assenting. Nay, if there be any heresy
among men, or blasphemy against God, at which the philosopher might be
allowed to forget his equanimity, and the Christian his charity, it is
the heresy and the blasphemy of believing and avowing that the
infinitely good and all-wise Author of the universe persists in creating
and sustaining a race of beings who, by a law of their nature, are
forever doomed to suffer all the atrocities and agonies of
misgovernment, either from the hands of others or from their own. The
doctrine of the inherent and necessary disability of mankind for
self-government should be regarded not simply with denial, but with
abhorrence; not with disproof only, but with execration. To sweep so
foul a creed from the precincts of truth, and utterly to consume it,
rhetoric should become a whirlwind, and logic fire. Indeed, I have never
known a man who des