public opinion. If it could be published annually from this capitol, through every school district of the United States, that there are States in the Union that have no system of common schools; and if their records could be placed beside the records of such States as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other States that have a common school system, the mere statement of the fact would rouse their energies, and compel them for shame to educate their children. It would shame out of their delinquency all the delinquent States.

Mr. Speaker, if I were called upon to-day to point to that in my own State of which I am most proud, I would not point to any of the flaming lines of her military record, to the heroic men and the brilliant officers she gave to the late contest: I would not point to any of her leading men of the past or the present; but I would point to her common schools; I would point to the honorable fact that in the great struggle of five years through which we have just passed, she has expended $12,000,000 for the support of her public schools. I do not include in that amount the sums expended upon our higher institutions of learning. I would point to the fact that fifty-two per cent of the taxation of Ohio for the last five years, aside from the war tax and the tax for the payment of her public debt, has been for the support of her schools. I would point to the schools of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and other cities of the State, if I desired a stranger to see the glory of Ohio. I would point to the thirteen thousand school houses and the seven hundred thousand pupils in the schools of Ohio. I would point to the $3,000,000 she has paid for schools during the last year alone. This, in my judgment, is the proper gauge by which to measure the progress and glory of States.

Gentlemen tell us there is no need of this bill-the States are doing well enough now. Do they know through what a struggle every State has come up, that has secured a good system of common schools. Let me illustrate this by the example of Pennsylvania. Notwithstanding the early declaration of William Penn

"That which makes a good constitution must keep it, namely, men of wis dom and virtue; qualities that because they descend not with worldly inheritance must be carefully propagated by a virtuous education of youth, for which spare no cost, for by such parsimony all that is saved is lost,"

notwithstanding that wise master builder incorporated this sentiment in his "framework of government" and made it the duty of the governor and council "to establish and support public schools;" notwithstanding Benjamin Franklin, from the first hour he became a

citizen of Pennsylvania, inculcated the value of useful knowledge to every human being in every walk of life, and by his personal and pecuniary effort did establish schools and a college for Philadelphia; notwithstanding the constitution of Pennsylvania made it obligatory upon the Legislature to foster the education of the citizens; notwithstanding all this, it was not till 1833-34 that a system of common schools, supported in part by taxation of property of the State, for the common benefit of all the children of the State, was established by law; and although the law was passed by an almost unanimous vote of both branches of the Legislature, so foreign was the idea of public schools to the habits of the people, so odious was the idea of taxation for this purpose, that even the poor who were to be specially benefited, were so deluded by political demagogues as to clamor for its repeal.

Many members who voted for the law lost their nominations, and others, although nominated, lost their election. Some were weak enough to pledge themselves to a repeal of the law; and in the session of 1835 there was an almost certain prospect of its repeal and the adoption in its place of an odious and limited provision for educating the children of the poor by themselves. In the darkest hour of the debate, when the hearts of the original friends of the system were failing from fear, there rose on the floor of the House one of its early champions, one who, though not a native of the State, felt the disgrace which the repeal of this law would inflict, like a knife in his bosom; one who, though no kith or kin of his would be benefited by the operations of the system, and though he should share its burdens, he would only partake with every citizen in its blessings; one who had voted for the orginal law although introduced by his political opponents, and who had defended and gloried in his vote before an angry and unwilling constituency; this man, then in the beginning of his public career, threw himself into the conflict, and by his earnest and brave eloquence saved the law, and gave a noble system of common schools to Pennsylvania.

I doubt if, at this hour, after the thirty years crowded full of successful labors at the bar, before the people, and in halls of legislation, the venerable and distinguished member [Mr. STEVENS], who now represents a portion of the same State in this House, can recall any speech of his life with half the pleasure he does that, for no measure with which his name has been connected is so fraught with blessings to hundreds of thousands of children, and to homes innumerable. I hold in my hand a copy of his brave speech, and I ask the clerk to read the passages I have marked:

"I am comparatively a stranger among you, born in another, in a distant State; no parent or kindred of mine did, does, or probably ever will dwell within your borders. I have none of those strong cords to bind me to your honor and your interest; yet, if there is any one thing on earth which I ardently desire above all others, it is to see Pennsylvania standing up in her intellectual, as she confessedly does in her physical resources, high above all her confederate rivals. How shameful then, would it be for these her native sons, to feel less so, when the dust of their ancestors is mingled with her soil, their friends and relatives enjoy her present prosperty, and their descendants, for long ages to come, will partake of her happiness or misery, her glory or her infamy!" * * "In giving this law to posterity, you act the part of the philanthropist, by bestowing upon the poor as well as the rich, the greatest earthly boon which they are capable of receiving; you act the part of the philosopher by pointing, if you do not lead them, up the hill of science; you act the part of the hero, if it be true, as you say, that popular vengeance follows close upon your footsteps. Here then, if you wish true popularity, is a theater on which you may acquire it."

"Let all, therefore, who would sustain the character of the philosopher or philanthropist, sustain this law. Those who would add thereto the glory of the hero, can acquire it here; for, in the present state of feeling in Pennsyl vania, I am willing to admit that but little less dangerous to the public man is the war-club and battle-axe of savage ignorance than to the lion-hearted Richard was the keen cimeter of the Saracen. He who would oppose it, either through inability to comprehend the advantages of general education, or from unwillingness to bestow them on all his fellow citizens, even to the lowest and the poorest, or from dread of popular vengeance, seems to want either the head of the philosopher, the heart of the philanthropist, or the nerve of the hero."

He has lived long enough to see this law, which he helped to found in 1834, and more than any other man was instrumental in saving from repeal in 1835, expanded and consolidated into a noble system of public instruction. Twelve thousand schools have been built by the voluntary taxation of the people, to the amount, for school houses alone, of nearly ten million dollars. Many millions of children have been educated in these schools. More than seven hundred thousand attended the public schools of Pennsylvania in 1864-65, and their annual cost, provided by voluntary taxation in the year 1864, was nearly three million dollars, giving employment to sixteen thousand teachers.

It is glory enough for one man to have connected his name so honorably with the original establishment and effective defense of such a system.

But it is said that the thirst for knowledge among the young; the pride and ambition of parents for their children, are agencies powerful enough to establish and maintain thorough and comprehensive systems of education.

This suggestion is answered by the unanimous voice of publicists and political economists. They all admit that the doctrine of "Demand and Supply" does not apply to educational wants. Even the most extreme advocates of the principle of laissez faire as a sound maxim of political philosophy, admit that governments must interfere in aid of education. We must not wait for the wants of the rising generation to be expressed in a demand for means of education. We must ourselves discover and supply their needs, before the time for supplying them has forever passed. John Stuart Mill says:

"But there are other things, of the worth of which the demand of the market is by no means a test; things of which the utility does not consist in ministering to inclinations, nor in serving the daily uses of life, and the want of which is least felt where the need is greatest. This is peculiarly true of those things which are chiefly useful as tending to raise the character of human beings. The uncultivated can not be judges of cultivation.

"Those who most need to be made wiser and better, usually desire it least, and if they desired it, would be incapable of finding the way to it by their own lights. It will continually happen on the voluntary system, that, the end not being desired, the means will not be provided at all, or that the persons requiring improvement having an imperfect or altogether erroneous conception of what they want, the supply called forth by the demand of the market, will be any thing but what is really required. Now any well intentioned and tolerably civilized government may think, without presumption, that it does, or ought to possess a degree of cultivation above the average of the community which it rules, and that it should, therefore, be capable of offering better education and better instruction to the people, than the greater number of them would spontaneously select.

"Education, therefore, is one of those things which it is admissible in principle that the government should provide for the people. The case is one to which the reasons of the non-interference principle do not necessarily or universally extend.

"With regard to elementary education, the exception to ordinary rules may, I conceive, justifiably be carried still further. There are certain primary elements and means of knowledge which it is in the highest degree desirable that all human beings born into the community should acquire during childhood. If their parents, or those on whom they depend, have the power of obtaining for them this instruction, and fail to do it, they commit a double breach of duty; toward the children themselves, and toward the members of the community generally, who are all liable to suffer seriously from the consequences of ignorance and want of education in their fellow citizens. It is, therefore, an allowable exercise of government to impose on parents the legal obligation of giving elementary instruction to children. This, however, can not fairly be done without taking measures to insure that such instruction shall always be accessible to them, either gratuitously r at å trifling expense."

This is the testimony of economic science. I trust the statesmen

of this Congress will not think the subject of education too humble a theme for their most serious consideration. It has engaged the earnest attention of the best men of ancient and modern times, especially of modern statesmen and philanthropists.

I will fortify myself in the positions I have taken by quoting the authority of a few men who are justly regarded as teachers of the human race. If I keep in their company I can not wander far from the truth. I can not greatly err while I am guided by their counsel. In his eloquent essay entitled Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, John Milton said:

"To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education, to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, economy, justice; not to admire wealth or honor; to hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one nis private welfare and happiness in the public peace, liberty and safety."

England's most venerable living statesman, Lord Brougham, enforced the same truth in these noble words:

'Lawgivers of England! I charge ye, have a care! Be well assured that the contempt lavished upon the cabals of Constantinople, when the council disputed on a text, while the enemy, the derider of all their texts, was thundering at the gate, will be a token of respect compared with the loud shout of universal scorn which all mankind in all ages will send up against you, if you stand still and suffer a far deadlier foe than the Turcoman,-suffer the parent of all evil, all falsehood, all hypocrisy, all discharity, all self-seeking-him who covers over with pretexts of conscience the pitfalls that he digs for the souls on which he preys, -to stalk about the fold and lay waste its inmates-stand still and make no head against him, upon the vain pretext to soothe your indolence, that your action is obstructed by religious cabals-upon the far more guilty speculation, that by playing a party game you can turn the hatred of conflicting professors to your selfish purposes!

"Let the soldier be abroad, if he will; he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage abroad, a person less imposing-in the eye of some insignificant. The Schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full uniform array."

Lord Brougham gloried in the title of schoolmaster, and contrasted his work with that of the military conqueror in these words:

"The conqueror stalks onward with the 'pride, pomp and circumstance of war,' banners flying, shouts rending the air, guns thundering, and martial music pealing, to drown the shrieks of the wounded and the lamentations for the slain. Not thus the schoolmaster in his peaceful vocation. He meditates and prepares in secret the plans which are to bless mankind; he slowly gathers around him those who are to further their execution; he quietly, though firmly, advances in his humble path laboring steadily, but calmly, till he has opened to