perhaps to a single man, rarely to a man with a family. This in many cases amounts to downright oppression. It is a violation of the great moral rule, that the laborer is worthy of his hire. It is also the worst possible policy. Its direct tendency is to degrade the office of teaching from its proper rank, and excellence, and to exclude from it all, of high talents and noble minds. Then, as to our common schools, who that knows how to cut down a tree, or make a shoe, would think of engaging himself to teach them, beyond a few months in the winter season, when he can do nothing else so very meagre and contemptible is the wages usually given for that sort of service? This is all wrong, radically wrong. Our entire system of common school education needs to be placed on a higher and more liberal foundation. Our youth can never be well and competently instructed in our schools as they now are; and these schools can never be what they ought to be to meet the wants of the community, till the compensation for teaching be raised far above what it now is; till indeed it be such as to exalt teaching to a profession, and make it an object for persons of talented minds and high qualifications, to choose it as their calling for life. This, in my opinion, is the great desideratum which needs. to be realized in our land. Something towards this has been done in some of the states, by establishing and endowing, at the public expense, high schools and seminaries, at which teachers may be better qualified for their work, and where a more thorough education may be obtained for the ordinary duties of life. But we have only, as yet, made a beginning. Connecticut, I am sorry to say, is far in arrears in this matter. I will not say, as has often been said, that our school fund, of more than two millions of dollars, does no good. But certain I am, that in the present mode of appropriating the annual income of the fund, but very little good is accomplished, compared with what might be. In many cases, there is reason to believe, it operates only as a bounty on indifference and covetousness; inducing the people to eke out a poor school of three months with a cheap master, where there ought to be a good school of six months with a master liberally paid. I repeat then, our whole system of education for the people needs to be put on higher and more liberal ground. In order to accomplish this, it is first of all necessary that the office of teaching should be generously sustained, and duly honored by the public; and then, none should be sought for, or allowed to fill the office, but persons in every respect, well qualified to discharge its duties, intelligent, virtuous, spirited, wholly devoted to their work. This is demanded by the essential dignity of the office of teaching. It is demanded by the general interests of education in our land. It is demanded, in a word, by the prosperity of our country; by our very being as a great, a free, and a happy nation. We fought for our independence; we achieved it. We have established a noble form of government, and rejoice in free institutions. We possess an inheritance richer in blessing, in privilege, in hope, than ever fell to the lot of any other peo ple under heaven. How is this inheritance to be preserved, and transmitted to bless those who are to come after us? I answer, by diffusing the means of education, of an enlightened, Christian education, among the entire mass of the people. I say Christian education; because I have not the slightest confidence in any other; least of all, have I any confidence in that half infidel, mongrel system of education, which excludes the vitalities of Christianity, and foolishly, as wickedly, would train the minds of our youth without God and his Bible. This then is the work which demands to be done for our country; our salvation as a nation depends upon it; and for its being done with the least possible delay, all in the community are responsible according to the influence possessed by each. In the eloquent language of him who delivered the closing lecture before this Institute at its annual meeting last year, I would say "Society is responsible, not society considered as an abstraction, but society as it consists of living members, which members we are. Clergymen are responsible, -all men who have enjoyed the opportunities of a higher education in colleges and universities, are responsible, for they can convert their means, whether of time or of talent, into instruments for elevating the masses of the people. The conductors of the public press are responsible, for they have daily access to the popular ear, and can infuse just notions of this high duty into the public mind. Legislators and rulers are responsible. In our country, and in our times, no man is worthy of the honored name of a statesman, who does not include the highest practicable education of the people, in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence, and by these he might claim the elevated rank of a statesman in other countries; but, unless he speaks, plans, labors, at all times and in all places, for the culture and edification of the whole people, he is not, he cannot be an American Statesman.” * It only remains that in my own behalf, and in behalf of my fellow-citizens, I bid a cordial welcome to the American Institute of Instruction to our city and to the hospitalities of the people. May all its deliberations be conducted in that wisdom which is from above, and serve to give a powerful and salutary impulse to the great and good cause of education. *H. Mann. 3 |