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plays and studies of the common school. Without this he can never be a fully qualified citizen, or prepared to act his part wisely as a citizen. Confined to a select school, where only the children of wealth and distinction are gathered, he will not know the merit there is in the real virtues of the poor, or the power that slumbers in their talent. He will take his better dress as a token of his better quality, look down upon the children of the lowly with an educated contempt, prepare to take on lofty airs of confidence and presumption afterward; finally, to make the discovery when it is too late, that poverty has been the sturdy nurse of talent in some unhonored youth who comes up to affront him by an equal, or mortify and crush him by an overmastering force. So also the children of the poor and lowly, if they should be privately educated, in some inferior degree, by the honest and faithful exertion of their parents; secreted as it were, in some back alley or obscure corner of the town, will either grow up in a fierce, inbred hatred of the wealthier classes, or else in a mind cowed by undue modesty, as being of another and inferior quality, unable, therefore, to fight the great battle of life hopefully, and counting it a kind of presumption to think that they can force their way upward, even by merit itself.

Without common schools, the disadvantage falls both ways in about equal degrees, and the disadvantage that accrues to the state, in the loss of so much character, and so many cross ties of mutual respect and generous appreciation, the embittering so fatally of all outward distinctions, and the propagation of so many misunderstandings, (righted only by the im mense public mischiefs that follow)-this, I say, is greater even than the disadvantages accruing to the classes themselves; a disadvantage that weakens immensely, the security of the state, and even of its liberties. Indeed, I seriously doubt whether any system of popular government can stand the shock, for any length of time, of that fierce animosity, that is certain to be gendered, where the children are trained up wholly in their classes, and never brought together to feel, understand, appreciate and respect each other, on the com

mon footing of merit and of native talent, in a common school. Falling back thus on the test of merit and of native force, at an early period of life, moderates immensely their valuation of mere conventionalities and of the accidents of fortune, and puts them in a way of deference that is genuine as well as necessary to their common peace in the state. Common schools are nurseries thus of a free republic, private schools of factions, cabals, agrarian laws and contests of force. Therefore, I say, we must have common schools; they are American, indispensable to our American institutions, and must not be yielded for any consideration smaller than the price of our liberties.

Nor is it only in this manner that they are seen to be necessary. The same argument holds, with even greater force, when applied to the religious distinctions of our country. It is very plain that we can not have common schools for the purposes above named, if we make distributions, whether of schools or of funds, under sectarian or ecclesiastical distinctions. At that moment the charm and very much of the reality of common schools vanish. Besides, the ecclesiastical distinctions are themselves distinctions also of classes, in another form, and such too as are much more dangerous than any distinctions of wealth. Let the Catholic children, for example, be driven out of our schools by unjust trespasses on their religion, or be withdrawn for mere pretexts that have no foundation, and just there commences a training in religious antipathies bitter as the grave. Never brought close enough to know each other, the children, subject to the great well known principle that whatever is unknown is magnified by the darkness it is under, have all their prejudices and repugnances magnified a thousand fold. They grow up in the conviction that there is nothing but evil in each other, and close to that lies the inference that they are right in doing what evil to each other they please. I complain not of the fact that they are not assimilated, but of what is far more dishonest and wicked, that they are not allowed to understand each other. They are brought up, in fact, for misunderstanding; separated that

they may misunderstand each other; kept apart, walled up to heaven in the inclosures of their sects, that they may be as ignorant of each other, as inimical, as incapable of love and cordial good citizenship as possible. The arrangement is not only unchristian, but it is thoroughly un-American, hostile at every point, to our institutions themselves. No bitterness is so bitter, no seed of faction so rank, no division so irreconcilable, as that which grows out of religious distinctions, sharpened to religious animosities, and softened by no terms of intercourse; the more bitter when it begins with childhood; and yet more bitter when it is exasperated also by distinctions of property and social life that correspond; and yet more bitter still, when it is aggravated also by distinctions of stock or nation.

In this latter view, the withdrawing of our Catholic children from the common schools, unless for some real breach upon their religion, and the distribution demanded of public moneys to them in schools apart by themselves, is a bitter cruelty to the children, and a very unjust affront to our institutions. We bid them welcome as they come, and open to their free possession, all the rights of our American citizenship. They, in return, forbid their children to be Americans, pen them as foreigners to keep them so, and train them up in the speech of Ashdod among us. And then, to complete the affront, they come to our legislatures demanding it, as their right, to share in funds collected by a taxing of the whole people, and to have these funds applied to the purpose of keeping their children from being Americans.

Our only answer to such demands is, "No! take your place with us in our common schools, and consent to be Americans, or else go back to Turkey, where Mohammedans, Greeks, Armenians, Jews are walled up by the laws themselves, forbidding them ever to pass over or to change their superstitions; there to take your chances of liberty, such as a people are capable of when they are trained up, as regards each other, to be foreigners for all coming time, in blood and religion." I said go back to Turkey-that is unnecessary. If we do not soon prepare a state of Turkish

order and felicity here, by separating and folding our children thus, in the stringent limits of religious non-acquaintance and consequent animosity, it will be because the laws of human nature and society have failed.

Besides, there are other consequences of such a breach upon the common school system, implied in yielding this demand, which are not to be suffered. A very great part of the children, thus educated, will have very inferior advantages. They will be shut up in schools that do not teach them what, as Americans, they most of all need to know, the political geography and political history of the world, the rights of humanity, the struggles by which those rights are vindicated, and the glorious rewards of liberty and social advancement that follow. They will be instructed mainly into the foreign prejudices and superstitions of their fathers, and the state, which proposes to be clear of all sectarian affinities in religion, will pay the bills!

It will also be demanded, next, that the state shall hold the purse for the followers of Tom Paine, and all other infidels, discharging the bills of schools where Paine's Age of Reason, or the Mormon Bible, or Davis' Revelations are the reading books of the children.

The old school Presbyterian church took ground, six years ago, in their General Assembly, at the crisis of their high church zeal, against common and in favor of parochial schools. Hitherto their agitation has yielded little more than a degree of discouragement and disrespect to the schools of their country; but if the Catholics prevail in their attempt, they also will be forward in demanding the same rights, upon the same grounds, and their claim also must be granted. By that time the whole system of common schools is fatally shaken. For, since education is thrown thus far upon the care of individual parents, still another result is certain to follow in close proximity, viz., the discontinuance of all common schools, and of all public care of education; and then we shall have large masses of children growing up in neglect, with no school at all provided to which they can be sent; ignorant, hopeless and debased creatures; banditti of the street; wild men of

anarchy, waiting for their leaders, and the guerilla practice of the mountains; at first the pest of society, and finally its end or overthrow. A result that will be further expedited, by the fact that many children, now in our public schools, will be gathered into schools of an atheistic or half pagan character, where they will be educated in a contempt of all order and decency, to be leaders of the ignorance and brutality supplied by the uneducated. How different the picture from that which is now presented by our beautiful system of common schools-every child provided with a good school, all classes and conditions brought together on an equal footing of respect and merit, the state their foster-mother, all property a willing and glad contributor for their outfit in life, and their success in the ways of intelligence and virtue!

Take it then for a point established, that common schools are to remain as common schools, and that these are to be maintained by the state as carefully as the arsenals and armed defenses of the country-these and no other. Just here, then, comes the difficult question, what we are to do, how to accommodate the religious distinctions of the people, so as to make their union in any common system of schools, possible-how the Catholics, in particular, are to be accommodated in their religion, in those societies and districts where Protestants are the majority; how Protestants, where Catholics are the majority?

The question how Pagans, Mohammedans, and Atheists, are to be accommodated, is, in my view, a different question, and one, I think, which is to be answered in a different manner. They are to be tolerated, or suffered, but in no case to be assisted or accommodated, by acts of public conformity. I can not agree to the sentiment sometimes advanced, that we are not a Christian nation, in distinction from a Pagan, Mohammedan or Infidel. Indeed I will go further, assuming the fact of God's existence, I will say that no government can write a legitimate enactment or pass a valid decree of separation from God. Still, after the act is done, God exists, God is the only foundation it has of public right or authori

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