rcumstances, I do not
hesitate to express the opinion that the failures need not be--would not
be one per cent."

Miss Catharine E. Beecher, of Brattleboro, Vermont, who has been engaged
directly and personally as a teacher about fifteen years, in Hartford,
Connecticut, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and who has had the charge of not
less than a thousand pupils from every state in the Union, after stating
these and other considerations, remarks as follows: "I will now suppose
that it could be so arranged that, in a given place, containing from ten
to fifteen thousand inhabitants, in any part of the country where I ever
resided, _all_ the children at the age of four shall be placed six hours
a day, for twelve years, under the care of teachers having the same
views that I have, and having received that course of training for their
office that any state in this Union can secure to the teachers of its
children. Let it be so arranged that all these children shall remain
till sixteen under these teachers, and also that they shall spend their
lives in this city, and I have no hesitation in saying I do not believe
that _one_, no, NOT A SINGLE ONE, would fail of proving a respectable
and prosperous member of society; nay, more, I believe every one would,
at the close of life, find admission into the world of endless peace and
love. I say this solemnly, deliberately, and with the full belief that I
am upheld by such imperfect experimental trials as I have made, or seen
made by others; but, more than this, that I am sustained by the
authority of Heaven, which sets forth this grand palladium of
education, '_Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is
old he will not depart from it._

"This sacred maxim surely sets the Divine _imprimatur_ to the doctrine
that _all_ children _can_ be trained up in the way they should go, and
that, when so trained, they will not depart from it. Nor does it imply
that education _alone_ will secure eternal life without supernatural
assistance; but it points to the true method of securing this
indispensable aid.

"In this view of the case, I can command no language strong enough to
express my infinite longings that my countrymen, who, as legislators,
have the control of the institutions, the laws, and the wealth of our
_physically_ prosperous nation, should be brought to see that they now
have in their hands the power of securing to _every_ child in the coming
generation a life of virtue and usefu