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ing the ground on which we expect and may be able to stand. In one view the question is wholly a religious question; in another it is more immediately a civil or political question. And yet the lines cross each other in so many ways that any proper discussion of the topic must cover both aspects or departments, the religious and the political. I take up the question at this early period, before it has become, in any sense, a party question, that I may have the advantage of greater freedom, and that I may suffer no imputation of a party bias, to detain me from saying any thing which pertains to a complete view of the subject.

As this day of fasting is itself a civil appointment, I have always made it a point to occupy the day, in part, with some subject that pertains to the public duties and religious concerns of the state or nation. I propose, therefore, now to anticipate, as it were, the pressure of this great subject, and discharge myself, once for all, of my whole duty concerning it; and I hope to speak of it under that sense of responsibility, as well as in that freedom from prejudice, which one of the greatest and most serious of all American subjects requires. I wish I might also speak in a manner to exclude any narrow and partial or sectarian views of it, such as time and the further consideration of years might induce a wish to qualify or amend.

I will not undertake to say that our Catholic friends have, in no case, any just reason for uneasiness or complaint. A great many persons and even communities will very naturally act, for a time, as power is able to act, and will rather take counsel of their prejudices than of reason, or of the great principles that underlie our American institutions. Consideration, as a rectifying power, is often tardy in its coming, and of course there will be something unrectified, for so long a time, in the matter that waits for its arrival.

Meantime the subject itself is one of some inherent difficulty, and can not be expected to settle itself upon its right foundation, without some delay or some agitation, more or less protracted, of its opposing interests and reasons. We began our history in all but the single colony of Baltimore,

as Protestant communities; and, in those especially of New England, we have had the common school as a fundamental institution from the first-in our view a Protestant institution-associated with all our religious convictions, opinions, and the public sentiment of our Protestant society. We are still, as Americans, a Protestant people, and many are entirely ignorant, as yet, of the fact that we are not still Protestant states also, as at the first; Protestant, that is, in our civil order, and the political fabric of our government. And yet we'very plainly are not. We have made a great transition; made it silently and imperceptibly, and scarcely know as yet that it is made. Occupied wholly with a historic view of the case, considering how the country and its institutions are, historically speaking, ours; the liberality and kindness we have shown to those who have come more recently to join us, and are even now heard speaking in a foreign accent among us; the asylum we have generously opened for them and their children; the immense political trust we have committed to them, in setting them on a common footing, as voters, with ourselves; and that now we offer to give a free education to their children, at the public expense, or by a tax on all the property of the state-considering all this, and that we and our fathers are Protestants, it seems to be quite natural and right, or even a matter of course, that our common schools should remain Protestant, and retain their ancient footing undisturbed.

But we shall find, on a second consideration, that we have really agreed for something different, and that now we have none to complain of but ourselves, if we have engaged for more than it is altogether pleasant to yield. Our engagement, in the large view of it, is to make the state or political order a platform of equal right to all sects and denominations of Christians. We have slid off, imperceptibly, from the old Puritan, upon an American basis, and have undertaken to inaugurate a form of political order that holds no formal church connexion. The properly Puritan common school is already quite gone by; the intermixture of Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians, Episcopalians, and diverse other

names of Christians, called Protestants, has burst the capsule of Puritanism, and, as far as the schools are concerned, it is quite passed away; even the Westminster catechism is gone by, to be taught in the schools no more. In precisely the same manner, have we undertaken also to loosen the bonds of Protestantism in the schools, when the time demanding it arrives. To this we are mortgaged by our great American doctrine itself, and there is no way to escape the obligation but to renounce the doctrine, and resume, if we can, the forms and lost prerogatives of a state religion.

But there is one thing, and a very great thing, that we have not lost, nor agreed to yield; viz., common schools. Here we may take our stand, and upon this we may insist as being a great American institution; one that has its beginnings with our history itself; one that is inseparably joined to the fortunes of the republic; and one that can never wax old, or be discontinued in its rights and reasons, till the pillars of the state are themselves cloven down forever. We can not have Puritan common schools-these are gone already-we can not have Protestant common schools, or those which are distinctively so; but we can have common schools, and these we must agree to have and maintain, till the last or latest day of our liberties. These are American, as our liberties themselves are American, and whoever requires of us, whether directly or by implication, to give them up, requires what is more than our bond promises, and what is, in fact, a real affront to our name and birthright as a people.

I mean, of course, by common schools, when I thus speak, schools for the children of all classes, sects and denominations of the people; so far perfected in their range of culture and mental and moral discipline, that it shall be the interest of all to attend, as being the best schools which can be found; clear too, of any such objections as may furnish a just ground of offense to the conscience or the religious scruples of any Christian body of our people. I mean, too, schools that are established by the public law of the state, supported at the public expense, organized and superintended by public au

thority. Of course it is implied that the schools shall be under laws that are general, in the same way as the laws of roads, records, and military service; that no distribution shall be made, in a way of exception, to schools that are private, ecclesiastical or parochial; that whatever accommodations are made to different forms of religion, shall be so made as to be equally available to all; that the right of separate religious instruction, the supervision, the choice of teachers, the selection of books, shall be provided for under fixed conditions, and so as to maintain the fixed rule of majorities, in all questions left for the decision of districts. The schools, in other words, shall be common, in just the same sense that all the laws are common, so that the experience of families and of children under them, shall be an experience of the great republican rule of majorities—an exercise for majorities, of obedience to fixed statutes, and of moderation and impartial respect to the rights and feelings of minorities-an exercise for minorities of patience and of loyal assent to the will of majorities—a schooling, in that manner, which begins at the earliest moment possible, in the rules of American law, and the duties of an American citizen.

And this, I undertake to say, is the institution which we are not for any reason to surrender, but to hold fast as being a necessary and fixed element of the public order, one without which our American laws and liberties are scarcely American longer; or, if we call them by that name, have no ground longer of security and consolidated public unity.

In the first place, it will be found, if we closely inspect our institutions, that the common school is, in fact, an integral part of the civil order. It is no eleemosynary institution, erected outside of the state, but is itself a part of the public law, as truly so as the legislatures and judicial courts. The school-houses are a public property, the district committees are civil officers, the teachers are as truly functionaries of the law as the constables, prison-keepers, inspectors and coroWe perceive then, if we understand the question rightly, that an application against common schools, is so far

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an application for the dismemberment and reorganization of the civil order of the state. Certain religionists appear, in the name of religion, demanding that the state shall be otherwise constructed. Or, if it be said that they do not ask for the discontinuance of the common schools, but only to have a part of the funds bestowed upon their ecclesiastical schools, the case is not mended but rather made worse by the qualification; for in that view they are asking that a part of the funds which belong to the civil organization shall be paid over to their religion, or to the imperium in imperio, their religion so far substitutes for the civil order. It is as if they were to ask that the health wardens should so far be substituted by their church wardens, or the coroner's inquest by their confessional, and that the state, acknowledging their right to the substitution demanded, should fee the church wardens and confessors, in their behalf. If an application that infringes on the civil polity of our states, in a manner so odious, is to be heard, the civil order may as well be disbanded, and the people given over to their ecclesiastics, to be ruled by them in as many clans of religion as they see fit to make. Are we ready, as Americans, to yield our institutions up in this manner, or to make them paymasters to a sect who will so far dismember their integrity?

This great institution, too, of common schools, is not only a part of the state, but is imperiously wanted as such, for the common training of so many classes and conditions of people. There needs to be some place where, in early childhood, they may be brought together and made acquainted with each other; thus to wear away the sense of distance, otherwise certain to become an established animosity of orders; to form friendships; to be exercised together on a common footing of ingenuous rivalry; the children of the rich to feel the power and do honor to the struggles of merit in the lowly, when it rises above them; the children of the poor to learn the force of merit, and feel the benign encouragement yielded by its blameless victories. Indeed, no child can be said to be well trained, especially no male child, who has not met the people as they are, above him or below, in the seatings,

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