of Mr. Burke-"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained, in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Or, if I may be borne with in borrowing again from a Bard, to whom I am already so much indebted, I may express the same ideas in other phraseology, — True Liberty always with right reason dwells Twinn 'd, and from her hath no dividual being; Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart passions catch the government If I have not thus far occupied your attention to no purpose, but a moment more will be required to bring together the two terms, of which I have thus attempted some description and analysis, and to exhibit their mutual relation and reciprocal influence. I have stated the highest end and best operation of a true popular education to be the endowment of the individual man with the power, and his instruction in the exercise, of a conscientious, intelligent, enlightened self-government; — and I have endeavored to show that this conscientious, intelligent, enlightened, self-government constitutes the whole basis, and much of the superstructure also, of what is properly understood. by a free civil government; and I need hardly say that it is no strained deduction or far-fetched inference, but an immediate and irresistible conclusion, from these premises, that the cause of a true Popular Education and the cause of Free Government are substantially one and the same cause, and that whoever and whatever promotes and advances the one, by the same influence or the same effort promotes and advances the other. But I may perhaps here be told, that I have rather stated what education ought to be, than what it is, and that however the Free Schools of America may propose as their ultimate object, that discipline of the moral and intellectual man which may best adapt him to the maintenance and enjoyment of liberty, it is not to be imagined, much less assumed, that the Free Schools of Prussia, Austria, and Russia, will pursue a course so directly calculated to overthrow the very governments by which they were originally instituted and are still supported and controlled. I will not undertake to determine how far this objection is founded on a just estimate of the designs of those to whom it relates, but prefer granting it at once all the force which it can possibly possess in this respect. Nicholas and Ferdinand and Frederic William may have established and endowed their schools and colleges in whatever arbitrary whim or tyrannical temper may be conceived of. They may still propose to themselves no other end, in these institutions, than that of fortifying their own prerogative and perpetuating their own dominion, and may strive to adapt their whole system of education to the single purpose of teaching their subjects greater loyalty and their slaves more submission. So Satan, "upon the tree of life, devising death, sat like a cormorant." But fortunately it is neither in the power of man nor devil to control events, nor is it in the mouth of either to bespeak results corresponding to their designs. and contrivances. That branch of education is yet to be discovered, that mode of teaching still to be invented, that class of studies still to be evoked from chaos, which can be turned to any purpose of tyranny. You cannot educate men to be slaves. It is only by withholding education from them that you can make or keep them so. You cannot teach the human mind that its legitimate condition is one of submission and servitude. It is only from the want of a teacher that it has ever fallen into that condition. Whatever difference of opinion there may be as to the system of education which is best fitted for the establishment and maintenance of free government, there is no system,none so narrow, none so arbitrary, none so purposely per verse and crooked,-which is not in some degree adapted to this end. The eye that is only opened to gaze upon midnight sees a world more than that which is wholly shut. Light is its natural element, and that light it will seek and find wherever a ray is gleaming through the darkness; and the brilliancy and the beauty of that single ray, enhanced by the very gloom with which it is surrounded, will make it look and long for another and another, and will prepare it to hail from the mountain top of an eager expectation the first blush or break of dawn. is it with the mind of man. Touch it, awaken it, agitate it, open it, and though it be only to perceive the darkest forms of tyrannical oppression, and to ponder upon the most unqualified doctrines of arbitrary and absolute power, liberty is still its element, and the love of liberty its instinct, and it will never cease to strive and struggle on till that love is gratified and that element gained. No, it is only in exile that Dionysius can safely turn schoolmaster. Education can never be converted into an engine of despotism, and the engineer who essays to use it so, will find himself "hoist with his own petard." The giant energies of the human intellect, while loaded with the chains and immured in the prisonhouse of ignorance, may toil and grind for the lords of the earth, as patiently as Samson at the mill of Gaza; but once unfetter them and lead them forth, and, though it be for no better end than to subserve the glory or minister to the sport of those who have summoned them, they will vindicate their own dignity, they will manifest their own might, they will assert their own title to freedom, even if it be only to fall themselves at the last, crushed beneath the same ruins with which they have overwhelmed their oppressors! But while I indulge in these expressions of seeming defiance, I am unwilling to leave the impression that I entertain any belief, that institutions of education have been established in Europe with any such views as those which have been supposed, or that the system which has been introduced there has been designedly framed to obstruct rather than advance the progress of freedom. The very general favor which that system has met with in our own country, and the trouble and expense with which its details have been procured and published, are an ample answer to any such idea. 14 Nor can the operation of this system upon the condition of the Old World be in any degree doubtful. Silent and gradual, perhaps, but certain and thorough, will be the revolution it will effect. Its progress may not be tracked in blood, nor its arrival at the successive stages of its course be heralded by a noise of battle. Its achievements may not be manifested by proscriptions and confiscations, nor its victories signalized either by the beheading of Kings, or the denial and defiance of the King of Kings. It is, indeed, one of the most cheering hopes, let me rather say, one of the most glorious assurances, which the establishment of the Free School system in Europe has inspired us with, that that advancement of human happiness and human liberty, which seems almost as much a Divine law, as the precession of the equinoxes, or the procession of the seasons, is not doomed to be brought about in time to come, as it so generally has been in time past, by mere violence and bloodshed. It was well said by Baron Cuvier, who distinguished himself almost as highly in France by his efforts in the cause of education, as he did in the world at large by his triumphs in the field of science: "Give schools before political rights; make citizens comprehend the duties that the state of society imposes on them; teach them what are political rights before you offer them for enjoyment; then all meliorations will be made without causing a shock; then each new idea, thrown upon good ground, will have time to germinate, to grow and to ripen, without convulsing the social body." And the great comparative anatomist need hardly have quitted his own peculiar province of research to learn and to illustrate this position. He had only to compare the millions of human bones with which the French Revolution strewed and almost covered the earth, with the few thousands which were thinly scattered over the battle-fields of our own land, and the conclusion was inevitable. By rescuing man from the yoke of ignorance and prejudice, as well as from the dominion of arbitrary political power; by delivering him from the bondage of tyrant passions as well as of tyrant princes; by supplying the check of an enlightened conscience wherever one of legal compulsion is removed, and substituting a sense of moral obligation wherever a political chain is broken, the Free School system, it cannot be doubted, will ultimately prevent the recurrence of those frightful periods of anarchy and uproar, those reigns of terror, which have so often formed the transition state, the middle passage, between servitude and freedom. And under its enlightening influence, a system of individual selfgovernment will be in operation, and a system of free civil government even in preparation, to receive man under the shelter of their twofold shield, in that moment of temptation and peril in which he first passes in triumph from the power of his oppressor. Such, we know, was the influence of this system, at the critical period of our own Revolution, when our fathers, under no other influences than those of the free and common schools which the Puritans had founded, and in which the principles of the people for a century and a half had been formed, were seen, as unflushed by triumph as they had been unterrified by defeat, building up the walls of a free constitutional government with one hand, even while they were still obliged to hold the weapons of war against a yet unsubdued and relentless foe in the other! And though it can be hardly hoped that a spectacle of equal sublimity, that an example of equal self-government, will soon again be exhibited to the world, some near approach and close analogy to it may be confidently anticipated in the future political changes of educated, school-taught Europe. But it is in its relation to the future condition of our own country, that it is most interesting to contemplate the political influences of popular education. Here, where society needs not to be reduced to political chaos again in order that its creation may begin aright; where all the modes of inequality and oppression, which seem to sanction a resort to force and violence when they can be put an end to in no other way, have been banished in advance; where no thrones remain to be overturned, and no revolutions achieved, in order to establish the forms of a free government in their purest and most perfect shape, here, the legitimate influence of a Free School system in giving substance and security to these forms, by counteracting and controlling those impulses and propensities by which they are so liable to be abused and perverted, and in gradually |