and more precious results? It is not the college alone which a large gift just now would endow in Iowa; it is a circle of Puritan churches soon to number hundreds and to outnumber those of old Puritan States; it is a magnificent commonwealth, whose people will presently be counted by millions. The thing should be "done suddenly." It cannot be done on too ample and generous a scale, or too soon. Three professorships are today vacant, two of which have never been filled, for lack of endowments, and these are essential ones. A single gift of $50,000 would fill them at once. A still larger gift, such as multitudes of Eastern institutions have received within ten years past, would crown the exceptionally central and advantageous position, and the deeply interesting history of this Christian college, with a commanding influence in the great commonwealth and a power for good as exceptionally wide-reaching and enduring.

ARTICLE III.*-COLLEGES AND STATE UNIVERSITIES.

EDUCATION, universal education, is one of the permanent themes of American thought and interest. Whatever else may enlist our attention, we can never be long unmindful of this one great interest of American society. No other great nation ever entrusted so much to the virtue and intelligence of the people, and no other nation has ever taken so much. pains to render the people worthy of the trust committed them. This watchful care of education has been greatly characteristic of us as a people in all our past history. But at no time in all our national life has there been a more imperative necessity of earnest and candid thoughtfulness on this subject than at present. That whole system of arrangements on which we rely for the education of the nation, needs to be re-examined, with a view to the proper adjustment and proportions of the several parts to the whole, and to one another. Not that any sudden revolution in our system is either desirable or possible. Whatever may be true in other lands, nothing worthy the name of revolution has ever been possible, in any part of our system. There is nothing in respect to which our national life is more misapprehended than in respect to this. Other nations are apt to suppose that every thing American is the extemporaneous creation of a motley multitude of impracticable theorizers. No conception could be further from the truth. It is because the thinkers of the old world have so generally fallen into this error, that they have so often and so utterly failed to understand us.

From the beginning, nothing that we have been or done has originated in the brain of the speculatist. Our own national life is a natural and spontaneous growth, from seeds whose existence and presence were coeval with our origin as a people. Nobody ever invented our Township system, our State govern

*It is thought that the readers of the New Englander will be interested in the different aspects of this important subject, as they are presented by well known educators in different parts of the country.-EDS. NEW ENGLANDER.

ments with their local administration, or even the peculiar features of our Federal Republic. They are one and all growths from seeds which Providence planted here, when North America began to be peopled by men of European origin.

Thoughtful men in all lands look with reverence upon the history and present condition of England, as the growth of ages, and confidently predict for her a long and glorious future. Her social state was not planned by an architect and built according to his model, like her cathedrals and her cities; it grew under the superintending care of Providence, like her oaks. But the same thing is no less true of the great American off-shoot from England. It is no human invention, but a product of mighty social forces by which it has been from the beginning developing and maturing. Constitutions and systems, in our country, are not, as in France, the extemporized creation of some coup d'état,-some dark and bloody night of revolution; but as in England, vital products matured by time. The only difference in this respect between the mother and the daughter is the difference of age.

Of no part of our social life is this more entirely true than of our system of education. It is not, either as a whole or in any of its parts, the creation of any one mind, or even of any generation; originally education was with us entirely religious in its aims. The common schools of early New England sprung from a solicitude that all the people, without any excep tion, should be so far instructed as to be intelligent readers of the Bible. The thought seemed quite shocking to those fathers of our country, that any child should be reared up among them without being familiarly acquainted with those oracles of God. For this reason they established schools for all the children in every community, and required that the school-master should accompany every band of emigrants that pressed into the surrounding wilderness. In like manner their colleges were founded and sustained with religious care, that there might be an unbroken succession of learned and cultivated men, to serve God in the more responsible and influential positions both in Church and State. All the schools of the early days of New England were as truly religious in their aims as their churches.

In process of time, this common stock sent off two distinct branches. One of them has grown into our great public school system, which is now rapidly overspreading the continent; the primary design of which is to bring within the reach of the whole people such rudiments of knowledge as are needful to fit them for citizenship. This branch has fallen, for the most part, and is falling more and more, under the control of the several States. The reason is obvious enough. In order that instruction may be imparted to the whole people, it is needful that it should be free; and the State only, by its power of taxation, is able to sustain a system of gratuitous instruction adequate to the wants of a whole people. It is the judgment of the nation that the voluntary principle is inadequate to the task, and that therefore it must be done by the State or never done thoroughly and adequately. The majority of our people have therefore, from a conviction of necessity, consented to intrust this part of our system of education to the State.

They have done so with the distinct understanding, that as in this country the Church is wholly distinct from the State, and has therefore nothing directly to do with the government, so, on the other hand, the State has nothing to do with religion. The tendency, therefore, is to exclude religion more and more from that part of our system of education which is under the control of the State. Our schools are not hostile to religion; they do not make war on it; but they do not interfere with it. Secular learning only is provided for, and religion is left to the Church, the family, and the individual. We are not now expressing any opinion for or against this arrangement. We are only stating facts and tendencies. The fact is undeniable, that we are rapidly tending toward a vast continental system of education for the instruction of the children of more than forty millions of people, in which there is likely to be no direct recognition of God and the Christian religion.

The other branch of our system of education embraces those institutions devoted to the higher education, which are sustained by individual munificence, and are free of State control, our Academies, Colleges, higher Female Seminaries, and for the most part our Professional Schools. In nearly all these institutions, except in the Schools of Law and Medicine, religion still

retains much the same place as in the days of our fathers; neither is there anywhere apparent a disposition to make them. less religious than they are and ever have been.

If in this condition of affairs the State were disposed to confine itself to the work of providing a rudimentary education for the whole people, and to leave the higher instruction to such institutions as the people might be disposed to found and sustain by their own voluntary liberality, the outlook of the future would not seem to most minds to afford any just ground of apprehension. It is not very easy for us to see why this might not be accepted as a satisfactory solution of the whole question. We are, perhaps, all convinced of the inadequacy of the voluntary principle to provide free instruction in the rudiments of learning to the children and youth of a great nation. This must be done, or our republic is a failure. It must be done by the State or not done at all. The State has a right to provide the conditions of its own safety and perpetuity. But in a free republic one of these is universal education, to the extent of qualifying the entire people for the duties of citizenship. Such an education it is the imperative duty of the State to provide.

But by what right the State taxes all the property and industry of the country, to provide instruction in the higher departments of learning for the comparatively few who can ever avail themselves of it, why the sweating, toiling operative should contribute for the instruction of his neighbor's son at college, while he is utterly unable to secure a like privilege for his own son, has never been made out to our satisfaction. It seems to us improbable that it ever will be.

In addition to this, many men who are by no means deficient either in intelligence or public spirit are beginning to think that taxation for gratuitous education has reached a point of unscrupulous extravagance in some portions of our country, which is exceedingly burdensome at present, and not a little alarming for the future. When we tax capital till from onefourth to one-third of the interest it will command is absorbed by taxation, we must not be disappointed if capital flees from exactions so oppressive, and seeks for itself a more congenial

home.