a correct
public sentiment, which shall animate and influence the teacher, which
shall give direction to the school, which shall furnish the necessary
public funds. An endowed free academy can have none of these things
permanently. Take, for example, the free school established at Norwich
by the liberality of thirty or forty gentlemen, who contributed ninety
thousand dollars. What security is there that fifty years hence, when
the educational wants of the people shall be changed, when the
population of Norwich shall be double or treble what it is now, when
science shall make greater demands, when these forty contributors shall
have passed away, this institution will answer the wants of that
generation? According to what we know of the history of this country, it
will be entirely inadequate; and, though none of us may live to see the
prediction fulfilled or falsified, I do not hesitate to say that the
school will ultimately prove a failure, because it is founded in a
mistake.

Then look and see what would have been the state of things if there had
been public spirit invoked to establish a public high school, and if the
means for its support had been raised by taxation of all the people, so
that the system of education would have expanded according to the growth
of the city, and year by year would have accommodated itself to the
public wants and public zeal in the cause. Though these means seem now
to be ample, they will by and by be found too limited. The school at
Norwich is encumbered with regulations; and so every endowed institution
is likely to be, because the right of a man to appropriate his property
to a particular object carries with it, in the principles of common law,
and in the administration of the law, in all free governments, the right
to declare, to a certain extent, how that property shall be applied.
Rules have been established--very proper and judicious rules for to-day.
But who knows that a hundred years hence they will be proper or
acceptable at all? They have also established a board of trustees,
ultimately to be reduced to twenty-five. These trustees have power to
perpetuate themselves. Who does not see that you have severed this
institution from the public sentiment of the city of Norwich, and that
ultimately that city will seek for itself what it needs; and that, a
hundred years hence, it will not consent to live, in the civilization of
that time, under the regulations which forty men have now es