lness here, and an eternity of
perfected bliss hereafter. How, then, can I express, or imagine, the
awful responsibility which rests upon them, and which hereafter they
must bear before the great Judge of nations, if they suffer the present
state of things to go on, bearing, as it does, thousands and hundreds of
thousands of helpless children in our country to hopeless and
irretrievable ruin!"

Testimony similar to the preceding might be multiplied to almost any
extent. Enough, however, I trust, has been said to remove any doubts in
relation to the redeeming power of education which the reader may have
previously entertained. Universal education, we have seen, constitutes
the most effectual and the only sure means of securing to individuals
and communities, to states and nations, exemption from all avoidable
evils of whatever kind, and the possession of a competency of this
world's goods, with the ability and disposition so to enjoy them as most
to augment human happiness. Yes, education, and nothing short of it,
will dissipate the evils of ignorance; it will greatly increase the
productiveness of labor, and make men more moral, industrious, and
skillful, and thus diminish pauperism and crime, while at the same time
it will indefinitely augment the sum total of human happiness. By
diminishing the number of fatal accidents that are constantly occurring
in every community, and securing to the rising generation such judicious
physical and moral treatment as shall give them sound minds in sound
bodies, it will lay an unfailing foundation for general prosperity, will
greatly promote longevity, and will thus, in both of these and in many
other ways, do more to increase the population, wealth, and universal
well-being of the thirty states of this Union than all other means of
state policy combined.

At the late Peace Convention at Paris to consider the practicability and
necessity of a Congress of Nations to adjust national differences,
composed of about fifteen hundred members, picked men from every
Christian nation, VICTOR HUGO, the President of the Convention, on
taking the chair, made an address that was received with great applause,
in which the following passages occur:

"A day will come when men will no longer bear arms one against the
other; when appeals will no longer be made to war, but to civilization!
The time will come when the cannon will be exhibited as an old
instrument of torture, and wonder expressed how s