n we assign to the work, or how
estimate the duty, of those intrusted with the education of the young?

Who can say what share of responsibility for the future of America is
upon the teachers of the land?

LIBERTY AND LEARNING.

[An Address delivered at Montague, July 4th, 1857.]

I congratulate you upon the auspicious moments of this, the eighty-first
anniversary of our National Independence; and its return, now and ever,
should be the occasion of gratitude to the Author of all good, that He
hath vouchsafed to our fathers and to their descendants the wisdom to
establish and the wisdom to preserve the institutions of Liberty in
America.

And I congratulate you that you accept this anniversary as the occasion
for considering the subject of education. Ignorant and blind worshippers
of Liberty can do but little for its support; but, whatever of change or
decay may come to our institutions, Liberty itself can never die in the
presence of a people universally and thoroughly educated. It is not,
then, inappropriate nor unphilosophical for us to connect Education and
Liberty together; and I therefore propose, after presenting some
thoughts upon the Declaration of Independence, and its relations to the
American Union, to consider the value of political learning, its
neglect, and the means by which it may be promoted.

The events and epochs of life are logical in their nature, and are
harmonious or inharmonious as the affairs of men are controlled by
principle, policy, or accident. Humboldt, Maury, and Guyot, Arago,
Agassiz, and Pierce, by observation, philosophy, and mathematics,
demonstrate the harmony of the physical creation. In the microscopic
animalculae; in the gigantic remains, whether vegetable or animal, of
other ages and conditions of life; in the coral reef and the mountain
range; in the hill-side rivulet that makes "the meadows green;" in the
ocean current that bathes and vivifies a continent; in the setting of
the leaf upon its stem, and the moving of Uranus in its orbit, they
trace a law whose harmony is its glory, and whose mystery is the
evidence of its divinity.

National changes, the movements and progress of the human race, as a
whole and in its parts, are obedient, likewise, to law; and are,
therefore, logical in their character, though generally lacking in
precision of connection and order of succession. Or it may be, rather,
that we lack power to trace the connection between events that dep