ADDRESS.

MY FRIENDS,—I take the liberty of calling your attention to the subject of Education. This is a subject on which everybody speaks, on which many write, but which is yet far from being exhausted. Much yet remains to be said, and done too, in reference to education, before we can have anything like the education befitting a free people, or demanded for the development and perpetuity of our free institutions.

Education is something more than is commonly understood by the term. Education is something more than the ability to read and write and cypher, with a smattering of Grammar, Geography and History into the bargain. Education is the formation of character. It is not acquired in schools only, in the few months or the few years our children are in the school-room. It begins with the first impression made on the senses of the infant, and ends only with the last made on those of the man before he sinks into the grave; and it embraces the results of all the circumstances and influences which have, or which have had, the least possible bearing in making up or determining the individual character. Its process is ever going on. The conversation, habits and conduct of parents; the spirit, manners

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and morals of brothers and sisters, of playmates, companions, associates and of the whole society, all contribute to it and aid in determining its character. These influences make up the real education received. Our schools do, and can do but little. Even their good influences may be more than overbalanced by the evil influences at home, in the streets, or in society at large.

Education will go on; there is no earthly power that can stop it. Our children will be educated in spite of all our efforts. But shall they be educated for good, or for evil? This is a question for the community to determine. They are educated for good, only when they are educated for their destiny; trained up, fitted to discharge the mission which God Almighty has given to each one. No education is a good one which does not take the child from its mother's arms, and train it up to be a MAN, with a lofty soul, with generous sympathies, high aims, conscious of his destiny, and prepared to leave his trace on his age and country, for good. God has given to each human being born into the world, a high and important mission, a solemn and responsible charge; and that only is a good education which recognises that mission, charge, and creates the power, and forms the character to fulfil it. This is the education we want.

This is the education we want; and the education we must have too, or vain are all our boasts of freedom and fallacious will prove all our hopes of preserving our free institutions. Freedom is not a thing to be written on paper, engrossed on parchments, or preserved in the archives of state; it must be written in the heart; it must be a well of living waters, springing up in the soul, and diffusing its fertilizing streams over the whole man, and the whole life. Liberty comes not from without; it is not a child of decrees, of conventions and legislative enactments; it comes, if it come at all, from within, from the very ground of the moral and intellectual man. It is only a free people that can make a free government; and it is only the freedom of the individual soul that can create and preserve freedom in the state.

We have instituted a free government; we have adopted the principle of universal suffrage; we have made, in some sort, every man in the country a legislator, given him a direct legal voice in all the affairs of the state and nation. This we have done. Some, indeed, may regret it, may blame the policy which has done it; but done it is, and it is in vain to attempt to undo it. We cannot go back to a property qualification in electors, even if we would. We might as well attempt to go back to the old Feudal System, and revive the old seignors and their vassals, lords and lords paramount. The whole tendency of modern civilization is against such a retrograde movement. He who would do it, must war not only against the whole spirit of modern civilization, but against the design of Christianity, against the whole force of Humanity, and even against the omnipotence of Humanity's Maker, God himself. Power has passed out of the hands of the few; it has passed down into the hands of the many, of the millions, and there it is, there it will be; there, too, thank God, it ought to be, and was intended by the Creator to be.

But this fact imposes upon every friend of law and order, upon every friend of the human race, and lover of individual or social progress, a solemn and imperious duty. Power, in the hands of an ignorant and vicious populace, is a dangerous thing. With the power should go the virtue and intelligence needed to wield it with safety and with beneficial results to Humanity. This virtue and this intelligence do not yet exist in any community on earth. They do not exist with us. We are yet far, very far, from the virtue which wills nought but the public good, and the intelligence which clearly perceives what that good is, and seizes at once the proper means for securing it. Few, very few, of our whole community, not one in a hundred, understand the principles of legislation, or can comprehend the full bearings of a single important law, or influential public measure. In this case, what safeguard have we for liberty? What certainty of just legislation and wholesome public measures? How can men vote understandingly, when they comprehend not the

entropy?

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course that they whom they vote for should pursue? The history of our past legislation, and the present condition of the country, may read us a useful lesson on this subject, if we are Knot among those who are incapable of being taught, even by experience.

No man can have observed the events, which have of late transpired in our country, without grief and alarm. The frequent occurrence of mobs, and lynching, shows us plainly that a lawless spirit is abroad, and a spirit not the less alarming because not in all cases confined to the lower classes. Let this spirit prevail, and where are we? And how will you check it? By riot laws? By preaching? By moral or patriotic lectures? No. You may read riot laws "till your throats are sore," preach till you are exhausted, give moral and patriotic discourses from sunrise till sundown, and from sundown to sunrise, and mobs will occur; Judge Lynch will occupy the bench, and Justice will desert her throne, and Liberty cover herself with sackcloth and ashes. Nor will the military save you: insubordination will enter its ranks, and the soldier called out to defend, may be the first to trample on law and order. You have no security, no arm of defence, so long as there are among you the materials out of which mobs are made, or tools for the lawless or the ill-disposed to use. Your only safety is in education, in an education which trains up the whole people to love law and order, which trains them up to love virtue and freedom, and which fits them to maintain freedom in the state, by first maintaining it in themselves.

And the whole people: the education, even the right education, of a few, will not suffice. Athens had her learned, her educated few; she has left us models in the arts, given us poets and orators, we yet emulate in vain, and philosophers, whose depths we are not yet able to fathom: but Athens has fallen, and for long ages sighed under the whip of the despot. Rome too, once the haughty mistress of the world, boasted of her freedom; but she has fallen, and Solitude reigns on the Seven Hills of her power. Wherefore? Not for the want of an educated few, not for the want of poets, orators, statesmen, jurists, philosophers;