tablished,
however wise the regulations may at the present moment be?

One hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Hollis, of London, made a
bequest to the university at Cambridge, with a provision that on every
Thursday a professor should sit in his chair to answer questions in
polemic theology. All well enough then; but the public sentiment of
to-day will not carry it out.

So it may be with the school at Norwich a hundred years hence. The man
or state that sacrifices the living public judgment to the opinion of a
dead man, or a dead generation, makes a great mistake. We should never
substitute, beyond the power of revisal, the opinion of a past
generation for the opinion of a living generation. I trust to the living
men of to-day as to what is necessary to meet our existing wants, rather
than to the wisest men who lived in Greece or Rome. And, if I would not
trust the wise men of Greece and Rome, I do not know why the people, a
hundred years hence, should trust the wise men of our own time.

And then look further, and see how, under a system of public
instruction, you can build up, from year to year, in the growth of the
child, a system according to his wants. Private instruction cannot do
this. What do we do where we have a correct system? A child goes into a
primary school. He is not to go out when he attains a certain age. He
might as well go out when he is of a certain height; there would be as
much merit in one case as in the other. But he is advanced when he has
made adequate attainments. Who does not see that the child is incited
and encouraged and stimulated by every sentiment to which you should
appeal? And, then, when he has gone up to the grammar school, we say to
him, "You are to go into the high school when you have made certain
attainments." And who is to judge of these attainments? A committee
appointed by the people, over whom the people have some ultimate
control. And in that control they have security for two things: first,
that the committee shall not be suspected of partiality; and secondly,
that they shall not be actually guilty of partiality. In the same
manner, there is security for the proper connection between the high
school and the schools below. But in the school at Norwich--of which I
speak because it is now prominent--you have a board of twenty-five men,
irresponsible to the people. They select a committee of nine; that
committee determines what candidates shall be transferred from the
gr