near it. provision of means for their instruction. And, for the contrast, he has only to leave the school, and walk a mile round the neighbourhood, in which it will be very wonderful, (we may say this of most parts of England,) if he shall not, in a populous district and on a fine day, meet with a great number of wretched disgusting imps, straggling or in knots, in the activity of mischief and nuisance, or at least the full cry of vile and profane voke them, to a determined exercise of thought to ascertain more definitely what there really is for them to form their schemes and calculations upon, and therefore to verify to themselves the reasons they have for persisting, in confidence that the labour will not be lost. And the instant they apply themselves, in this severe sobriety, to the estimates, they have the fact conspicuous before them, that there is at any rate such an efficacy in cultivation, that it is quite certain a well culti-language; with here and there, as a lord among them, vated people cannot remain on the same degraded moral level as a neglected ignorant one, or any where None of those even that value such designs the least, ever pretend to foresee, after they shall have taken effect, an undiminished prevalence of rudeness and brutality of manners, of delight in spectacles and amusements of cruelty, of noisy revelry, of sottish intemperance, or of disregard of character. It is not pretended to be foreseen that the poorer classes will then continue to display so much of that heedless and almost desperate improvidence, respecting their temporal means and prospects, which has aggravated the calamities of the present times. It is not predicted that an universal school discipline will bring up several inillions to the neglect, and many of them in the impudent contempt, of attendance on the ministrations of religion. The result will at all hazards, by every one's acknowledgment, be the contrary of all this. But more specifically:-The promoters of the plans of popular education sce a most important advantage gained in the very outset, and as perhaps the smallest matter in the account of emolument, in the obvious fact, that in their schools a very large portion of time is employed well, that otherwise would infallibly be employed ill. Let any one introduce himself into one of these places of assemblage, where there has been time to mature the arrangements into the most efficient system. He should not enter as an important personage, in patronizing and judicial state, to demand the respectful looks of the whole tribe from their attention to their printed rudiments and their slates; but glide in as a quiet observer, just to survey at his leisure the character and operations of the scene. Undoubtedly he will descry here and there the signs of inattention, weariness, or vacancy, not to say of perverseness. Even these individuals, however, are out of the way of practical harm; and at the same time he will see a multitude of youthful spirits acknowledging the duty of directing their best attention to something altogether foreign to their wild amusements; of making a protracted effort in one mode or another of the strange business of thinking. He will perceive in many the unequivocal indications of a real grave and earnest effort made to acquire, with the aid of visible signs and implements, a command of what is invisible and immaterial. They are thus treading in the precincts of an intellectual economy; the economy of thought and truth, in which they are to live for ever; and never, to eternity, will they have to regret this period and part of their employments. He will be delighted to think how many disciplined actions of the mind, how many just ideas, distinctly admitted, that were strangers at the beginning of the day's exercise, (and among these ideas some to remind them of God and their highest interest,) -there will have been by the time the busy and well ordered company breaks up in the evening, and leaves silence within these walls. He will not indeed grow romantic in hope; he knows too much of the nature to which these beings belong; knows therefore that the desired results of this discipline will but partially follow; but still rejoices to think that partial result, which will most certainly follow, will be worth incomparably more than all it will have cost. Now let him, when he has contemplated this scene, consider how the greatest part of this numerous company would have been employed during the same hours, (whether of the sabbath or other days,) but for such a an elder larger one growing fast into an insolent blackguard. He may make the comparison, quite sure that such as they are, and 30 employed, would many now under the salutary discipline of yonder school have been, but for its institution. But the two classes, so beheld in contrast, might they not seem to belong to two different nations? Do they not seem growing into two extremely different orders of character? Do they not even seem preparing for different worlds in the final distribution? The friends of these designs for a general and highly improved education, may proceed farther in this course of verifying to themselves the grounds of their assurance of happy results. A number of ideas decidedly the most important that were ever formed in human thought, or imparted from the supreme mind, will be so taught in these institutions, that it is absolutely certain they will be fixed irrevocably and for ever in the minds of many of the pupils. It will be as impossible to erase these ideas from their memories as to extinguish the stars. And in the case of many, perhaps the majority, of these youthful beings, advancing into the temptations of life, these grand ideas, thus fixed deep in their souls, will distinctly present themselves to judgment and conscience an incalculable number of times. What a number, if the sum of all these reminiscences of these ideas, in all the minds now assembled in a numerous school, could be conjectured! But if one in a hundred of these recollections, if one in a thousand, shall have the efficacy that it ought to have, who can compute the amount of the good resulting from the tuition which shall have so enforced and fixed these ideas that they shall infallibly be thus recollected? And it is altogether out of reason to hope that the desired efficacy will, as often as once in a thousand times, attend the luminous rising again of a solemn idea to the view of the mind? Is still less than this to be hoped for our unhappy nature, and that too while a beneficent God has the superintendence of it? The institutions themselves will gradually improve in both the manner and the compass of their discipline. They will acquire a more vigorous mechanism, (if we may so name it,) and a more decidedly intellectual character. In this latter respect, it is but comparatively of late years that schools for the inferior classes have ventured any thing beyond the humblest pretensions. Mental cultivation-intellectual and moral disciplinealmost the word education itself-were terms of denomination which they were reverently cautious of taking in vain. They would have been regarded as ot too ambitious an import, as seeming to betray somewhat of the impertinence of a disposition, (for the idea of the practicability of any such invasion would have been scorned,) to encroach on a ground exclusively appropriate to the superior orders. Schools for the poor were to be as little as possible scholastic. They were to have every possible assimilation to the workshop, excepting perhaps in one particular,-that of working hard: for the scholars were literally to throw time away rather than be occupied with any thing beyond the merest rudiments. Their advocates and petitioners for aid were to avow and plead how little it was that they pretended or presumed to teach. The argument in their behalf was either to begin or end with saying, that they only taught reading and writing; or if it could not be denied that there was to be some meddling with the first rules of arithmetic,-we may safely appeal to some of these pleaders whether they did not, twenty or thirty | mechanies, should continue to be kept in stupid igno years since, bring out this addition with the manage- rance? ment and hesitation of a confession and apology. It is a prominent characteristic of that happy revolution we have spoken of as in commencement, that this aristocratic notion of education is breaking up. The theory of the subject is loosening into enlargement; and no longer presumes, or will not much longer presume, to impose a niggardly restriction on the extent of what shall be sought to be accomplished in schools for the inferiors of the community. As these institutions go on, augmenting in number and improving in organization, their pupils will bring their quality and efficacy to the proof, as they grow to maturity, and go forth to act their part in society. And there can be no doubt, that while too many of them may probably be mournful examples of the evil genius of the corrupt nature, and the infection of a bad world, prevailing against the better influences of instruction, and may descend toward the old wretched condition of the people, a very considerable proportion will take and permanently maintain a far higher ground. They will have become imbued with an element, which will have put them in strong repulsion to that coarse vulgar that will be sure to continue in existence, in this country, long enough to be a trial of the moral taste of this better cultivated race. It will be seen that they cannot associate with it by choice, and in the spirit of companionship. And while they are thus withheld on their part, from approximating, it may be hoped that the repelling principle will be converted into attraction in the case of a certain less ill affected portion of that vulgar. Its entire numbers cannot remain careless, contemptuous, or merely and malignantly envious, at sight of the advantages obtained, through the sole medium of personal improvement, by those who had otherwise been exactly on the same level as themselves. The effect on pride, in some, and on better propensities, it may be hoped, in others, will be to excite them to make their way upward to a community which, they will clearly see, could commit no greater folly than to come downward to them. And we will presume a friendly disposition in most of those who shall have been raised to this higher ground, to meet such aspirers and help them to ascend. And while they will thus draw upward the less immovable and hopless part of the mass below them, they will themselves on the other hand be placed, by the respectability of their understanding and manners, within the influence of the higher cultivation of the classes above them; a great advantage, as we have taken occasion to notice in a former stage of these observations.. -We must not, however, attribute high cultivation, as quite a thing of course in the classes above them, meaning by this designation the superiority in property and what is called condition in life. For in truth, too many of these more privileged persons may be observed to betray a disgraceful deficiency of what is indispensible in the mind in order to dignify their station. But here another important advantage is suggested as likely to accrue from the better education of the common people, namely, that their rising attainments would compel not a few of their superiors to betake themselves to mental improvement, in order to keep their desired distance. Would it not be a most excellent thing that they should find themselves thus incommodiously pressed upon by a new and strange circumstance in the creation, and forced to preserve that ascendency for which wealth and station would formerly suffice, at the coast, now, of a good deal more reading, thinking, and general self-discipline? Would it be a worthy sacrifice, that to spare some substantial agriculturists, idle gentlemen, and sporting or promenading ecclesiastics, such an afflictive necessity, the actual tillers of the ground, and the workers in manufacture and N | It is very possible this may excite a smile, as the threatening of a necessity or a danger of these privileged persons, which it is thought they may be comforta bly assured is very remote. This danger,-that a good many of them, or rather of those who are coming in the course of nature to succeed them in the same rank, will find that its relative consequence cannot be sustained but at a very considerably higher pitch of mental qualification,-is threatened upon no stronger presages than the following:-Allow us first to take it for granted, that no very long course of years will have passed before the case comes to be, that a large proportion of the children of the lower classes are trained through a laborious discipline, during a series of years, in such schools as every thing possible is done to render efficient. Then, if we include in one computation all the time they will have spent in real mental exercise and acquirement there, and all those pieces and intervals of time which we may reasonably hope that many of them will employ to the same purpose in the subsequent years, a good proportion of them will have employed, by the time they reach middle age, many thousands of hours more than people in their condition have heretofore done, in a way the most directly tending to the improvement of their minds. And how must we be estimating the natural capacities of these inferior classes, or the perceptions of the higher, not to foresee as a consequence, that these latter will find their relative situation greatly altered, with respect to the measure of knowledge and mental power requisite as one most essential constituent of their superiority, in order to command the unfeigned deference of their inferiors? Our strenuous promoters of the schemes for cultivating the minds of all the people, are not afraid of professing to foresee, that when schools, of that completely disciplinarian organization which they will gradually attain, shall have become general, and shall be vigourously seconded by all those auxiliary expedients for popular instruction which are also in progress, a very pleasing modification will become apparent in the character, the moral colour, if we might so express it, of the people's ordinary employment. The young persons so instructed, being appointed, for the most part, to the same occupations to which they would have been destined had they grown up in utter ignorance and vulgarity, are expected to give striking evidence that the meanness, the debasement almost, which had characterized many of those occupations, in the view of the more refined classes, was in truth the debasement of the men rather than of the callings; which, it is anticipated, will change to an appearance of much more respectability, as associated with the sense, decorum, and self-respect of the performers, than they had borne when blended and polluted with all the low habits, manners, and language, of ignorance and vulgar grossAnd then for the degree of excellence in the performance-who will be the persons most likely to excel, in the many branches of workmanship and business which admit of being hetter done in proportion to the degree of intelligence directed upon them? And again, who will be most in requisition for those offices of management and superintendence, where something must be confided to judgment and discretion, and where the value is felt, (often grievously felt from the want,) of some power of combination and foresight? ness. Such as these are among the subordinate benefits reasonably, we might say infallibly, calculated upon. Our philanthropists are confident in foreseeing also, that very many of these better disciplined young persons will be valuable co-operators against that ignorance from which themselves have been so happily saved; will exert an influence, by their example and the steady avowal of their opinions, against the vice and folly in AUTHOR OF "THE ANATOMY OF DRUNKENNESS," AND MEMBER OF THE FACULTY OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS OF GLASGOW. HARTFORD: S. ANDRUS AND SON. in his humble situation. You would consent to his reading a slender abridgment of voyages and travels; but what is to become of him if nothing less will content him than the whole length story of Captain Cook? He will direct, it is to be hoped, some of his best attention to the supreme subject of religion. And you would quite approve of his reading some useful tracts, some manuals of piety, some commentary on a catechism, some volume of serious plain discourses; but he is absolutely undone if his ambition should rise at length to Stillingfleet, or Howe, or Jeremy Taylor. And yet all this while we can believe that he acquits himself with exemplary regularity and industry in his allotted labours; and that even in this very capacity he is preferred by the men of business to the illiterate tools in his neighbourhood; nay, most likely preferred, in the more technical sense of the word, to the honourable, but often sufficiently vexatious office, of directing and superintending the operations of those tools. And where, now, is the evil he is incurring, or causing, during this progress of violating, step after step, the circumscription by which the aristocratic compasses were again and again, with reluctant extension to successive greater distances, defining the scope of the knowledge proper for a man of his condition? It is a bad thing, is it, that he has a great variety of ideas to relieve the tædium incident to the sameness of his course of life; that, with many things which had else been bare unmeaning facts and objects, he has many interesting associations, like woodbines and roses wreathing round the stumps of trees; that the world is a translated and intelligible volume before his eyes; that he has a power of applying himself to think of what becomes at any time necessary for him to understand. Is it a judgment upon him for his temerity, that he has so much to impart to his children as they are growing up, and that if some of them are already come to maturity, they know not where to find a man to respect more than their father? Or if he takes a part in the converse and devotional exercises of religious society, is no one there the better for the clearness and plenitude of his thoughts and the propriety of his expression? But there would be no end of the preposterous suppositions fairly attachable to the notion, that the mental improvement of the common people has some proper limit of arbitrary prescription, on the ground simply of their being the common people, and quite distinct from the restriction which their circumstances may invincibly impose on their ability. Taken in this latter view, we acknowledge that their condition would be a subject for most melancholy contemplation, if we did not hope for better times. The benevolent reflector when sometimes led to survey in thought the endless myriads of beings with minds within the circuit of a country like this, will have a momentary vision of them as they would be if all improved to the highest mental condition to which it is naturally possible for them to be exalted; a magnificent spectacle but it instantly fades and vanishes. And the sense is so powerfully upon him of the unchangeable economy of the world, which even if the fairest fondest visions of the millennium itself were realized, would still render such a thing actually impossible, that he hardly regrets the bright scene was but a beautiful cloud, and melts away. His imagination then descends to view this immense tribe of rational beings in another, and comparatively moderate state of the improvement of their faculties, a state not one third part so lofty as that in which he had beheld all the individuals improved to the highest degree of which each is naturally capable; and he thinks, that the condition of man's abode on earth might admit of their being raised to this elevation. But he soon sees, that till a mighty change shall take place in the system according to which the nations are managing their affairs, this too is impossible; and with regret he sees even this inferior ideal specta cle pass away, to rest on an age in distant prospect. At last he takes his imaginary stand on what he feels to be a very low level of the supposed improvement of the general popular mind; and he says, Thus much, at the least, should be a possibility allowed by the circumstances of the people under any tolerable order of the disposition of national interests; and then he turns to look down upon an actual condition in which care, and toil, and distress, render it utterly impossible for a great proportion of the people to reach, or even approach, this his last and lowest conception of what the state of their minds ought to be. In spite of all the optimists, it is a grievous reflection, after the race has had so many thousands of years on earth to improve its condition, that all the experience, the philosophy, the science, the art, the power acquired by mind over matter that all the contributions of all departed and all present spirits and bodies, yes, and all religion too, should have come but to this;-to this, that in what is esteemed the most favoured and improved nation of all terrestrial space and time, a vast proportion of the people are absolutely found in a condition which confines them, with all the rigor of neces sity, to the veriest childhood of intelligent existence, without its innocence. But at the very same time, and while compassion is rising at such a view, there comes in on the other hand, the reflection, that even in the actual state of things, there are a considerable number of the people who might acquire a valuable share of improvement which they do not. Great numbers of them grown up, waste by choice, and multitudes of children waste through utter neglect, a large quantity of precious time, which their narrow circumstances still leave free from the iron dominion of necessity. And they will waste it, it is certain that they will, till education shall have become general, and much more vigorous in discipline. If through a miracle there were to come down on this country, with a sudden delightful affluence of temporal amelioration, resembling the vernal transformation from the dreariness of winter, an universal prosperity so that all should be placed in ease and plenty, it would require another miracle to prevent this benignity of heaven from turning to a dreadful mischief. What would the great tribe of the uneducated people do with the half of their time, which we may suppose that sich a state would give to their voluntary disposal? Every one can answer infalliby, that the far greater number of them would consume it in idleness, vanity, or abomination. Educate them, then, educate them;—or, in all circumstances and events, calamitous or prosperous, they are still a race made in vain! In quitting the subject, we wish to express, in strong terms, the applause and felicitations due to those excellent individuals, found here and there, who in very humble circumstances, and perhaps with very little advantage of education in their youth, have been excited to a strenuous continued exertion for the improvement of their minds, by which they have made, (the unfavourable situation considered,) admirable attainments, which are now passing with inestimable worth into the instruction of their families, and a variety of usefulness within their sphere. They have nobly struggled with their threatened destiny, and have overcome it. When they think, with regret, how confined, after all, is their portion of knowledge, as compared with the rich possessions of those, who have had from their infancy all facilities and the amplest time for its acquirement, let them be consoled by reflecting, that the value of mental progress is not to be measured solely by the quantity of knowledge possessed, but partly, and indeed still more, by the corrective invigorating effect produced on the mental powers by the resolute exertions made in attaining it. And therefore, since, under their great disadvantages, it has required a much greater degree of this resolute exertion in them to force their way victoriously out of |