BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

ADDRESS OF HON. EDWARD EVERETT.

the Girls' High and Normal School, twenty | with the public. In short, it assumes the Grammar Schools-seven for boys, seven entire prostration of the educational for girls, and six for both sexes-and two system of the country, and the inaugurahundred and fifty primary schools. In tion of a millenium of ignorance. It these schools of all kinds, about twenty- requires but little reflection to see that, seven thousand children were educated under such circumstances, the community the past year. Here, then, is an organiza- would soon sink into utter barbarism, as tion which takes the entire rising genera- it is indeed only in the lowest forms of tion of both sexes, (with a sad exception, barbarous and savage life that schools to which I shall presently advert,) from and school education of some kind are the age of five to that of fifteen, the wholly unknown. Plainly, four or five forming period of life, when the remark generations would be enough, under the of the moral poet has its direct application, blighting influence of such a state of that "just as the twig is bent the tree's things as I have indicated, to reduce the inclined," places them for ten years, and most enlightened community to a level for five or six hours daily, under the with the degraded tribes of the Pacific watchful eye of vigilant guardians; sub. islands, or of the interior wastes of our jects them all this time to a course of in- continent. tellectual and moral discipline and instruction, under well qualified and faithful teachers; imparts to them those branches of knowledge which belong to a good ed. ucation for almost any walk in life; trains them to habits of industry, application, and attention to prescribed duty; inculcates upon them the great laws of moral obligation, and habituates them to the proprieties of virtuous social life. Such in a word is the system; such its operation.

Now in this, as in so many similar cases, we are so familiar with the working of the system; it is presented so constantly in detail to our observation; we are so seldom called upon to view it as a whole, that we form no adequate conception of its supreme importance to the well-being -I might rather say, the very existence, of a civilized community. We have perhaps never asked ourselves, what would be the state of our city if some fatal delusion should come over the public mind, and the system of public education, henceforward and forever, should be done away with; if, for instance, the municipal government, from this time forward, were to refuse to appropriate a dollar for edueation, and in consequence our school houses should be shut up; our faithful instructors of both sexes dismissed; the twenty-seven thousand children now educated at the public expense left to grow up in ignorance, mental and moral, of all that they are now taught between the ages of five and fifteen. Such a state of things implies, of course, a depravity of the public conscience, which would cause all private establishments of education to be put a stop to and destroyed, equally

And I fear that we need not go so far as to the barbarous tribes of the Pacific islands, or the savage aborigines of our own continent, to measure the difference between a highly-educated community and one lying in a state of universal and midnight darkness. There is in all large cities, in Boston and in New-York, as in Paris and London, a city within the city; or rather, outside of the city of the educated, the industrious, and the prosperous there is the city of the ignorant, the wretched, the forlorn. There are in this our beloved Boston, not included in those favored twenty-seven thousand, among whom it is your great privilege, my young friends, to be included, hundreds, I fear I must say thousands, of poor young creatures who have no part or share in this mighty heritage of good. Sometimes in consequence of the poverty of the parents, too great to provide the children decent clothing, or to dispense with their time-the older children being kept at home to take care-and what care?-of the younger; sometimes from the shortsighted cupidity of the parents, unwilling to give up the wretched gains to be earned by peddling newspapers, (an unmitigated nuisance,) lozenges, and matches; in many cases from a stolid and impenetrable insensibility-the inheritance from generations of oppression in the older worldto the importance of education, there are, in this enlightened city of Boston, whose expenditure for education is no where exceeded, some hundreds of children who never go to school; who grow up in profound ignorance; who pass their lives in the street, at best in the demoralizing occupations to which I have alluded;

often in entire idleness; practicing all the varieties of juvenile vice and depravity, and struggling under all the forms of juvenile destitution and suffering.

Yes, living, herding I had almost said, within a few rods of our comfortable homes, nobody follows, them to their noisome cellars and dismal garrets, save now and then a kind-hearted Samaritan of either sex, more frequently the policeman and the constable, they grow up to be the pest and the scourge of the community, to people our houses of correction and prisons, and sink, the victims of want, of sin, and sorrow, to early and unlamented graves.

ileges of education, so bountifully lavished on you, and pass the forming years of their life in ignorance, idleness, and vice. The same has ever been the case in the terrible commotions of Europe. A large share of the disorders of the revolution in Paris in 1848 were ascribed to juvenile miscreants. In the terrible riots in Bristol in 1831, in the words of the Annual Register, gangs of boys, "that seemed trained to their hellish arts," went round the city, setting fire to buildings public and private; and the mob which held London at its mercy for a week in 1780, of which I dare say some of you, my young friends, could give us a minute account, was, according to Horace Walpole, "two thirds apprentices and women."

These and other similar facts, which might be indefinitely multiplied, teach us, in language too plain to be mistaken, that we are indebted, in the last resort, for the preservation of peace in the community, not exclusively to our armed soldiery— cavalry, artillery, infantry-necessary as their interposition is at critical moments, but to this peaceful army of twentyseven thousand children; marshaled, not by major and brigadier-generals, but by their faithful teachers of either sex; quartered not in the barracks of Readville or the casemates of Fort Independence, but in these commodious school houses; and waging the great war against the legion hosts of ignorance, vice, and anarchy, not with cannons and Minié rifles, but with the spelling-book, the grammar, and the Bible!

Such is the career, I repeat, to which hundreds, in our generous and enlightened Boston, seem doomed; poor creatures, who, after public liberality and private benevolence have done their utmost, never hear, from the beginning to the end of the year, a cheerful encouraging word; never put on a clean decent garment; never sit down to a comfortable meal; never enter into a school house or a church; never utter or hear the name of God or Christ except in some horrid oath. In quiet times the existence of such a class-as a class-is unknown to the mass of the community. Individuals belonging to it are scattered, here and there, about the streets; -we gaze with wonder and pity on their squalid rags and haggard cheeks, and mourn over a misery which seems to defy relief. It is in times of disorder and commotion that they swarm from their coverts, and make their existence too sadly felt. The newspapers tell us that the hideous mobs It has been objected to placing the syswhich have lately spread terror and deso- tem of education for the two sexes so lation in the city of New-York were com- nearly on the same footing, that there is a posed in part of very young persons. Out want of employment for well-educated "of sixty-six persons thus far (20th July) girls; that we are training them beyond ascertained to have been killed, fourteen the demands of society. If this objection were boys of from six to twelve years of was ever well founded, which I greatly age, shot during the riot and burning of doubt, it is fast ceasing to be so. The cirthe armory at the corner of 21st street and cle of employment for young women is 2d avenue. Although of such tender years, daily widening. Two thirds of the busithey were taking an active part in the ness of teaching in our schools-a great riot!" In the attempted riot in this city profession of itself-has already passed last week two young children were killed. into their hands. Many are finding emNo one supposes that these children in ployment as book-keepers and clerks, and New-York or Boston, though of the school this will be more and more the case while age, belong to the class which receives the the war lasts. In short, as in all other tutelage and instruction of our excellent cases, demand and supply will act and reschools; they belonged unquestionably to act upon each other, and in proportion as that other unhappy class which I have de- our girls are educated and qualify themscribed, who, for the reasons I have men- selves for occupation, hitherto monopoliztioned, grow up without enjoying the priv-ed by the other sex, our young women,

where there is no natural unfitness, will find openings for the service.

I was much struck, a couple of days ago, with a testimony to the importance Then there is the great sphere of female of these home-bred resources for happiness, occupation and influence-constantly talk- in a quarter where it was hardly to be ed about, but far too lightly deemed of by expected, I mean the correspondence of either sex-I mean the sphere of home. Napoleon the First. In the eleventh volThe great object in life for both sexes, ume of that work, (which is regularly sent after keeping a good conscience, should to our noble public library by the present be to make home attractive and happy. Emperor of the French,) I chanced upon a It is the most terrible of all mistakes, that very agreeable letter written in 1806 by the main thing to be thought of is out- Napoleon I. to his step-son, Prince Eugene, door success; professional advancement, the Viceroy of Italy, then lately married lucrative business, a prosperous establish- to a Bavarian princess. The mighty ment in life; alas, these may all exist with chieftain and conqueror, then at the hight a dreary cheerless household. On the of his power, writes to the young prince, other hand the intellectual treasures to whom he was much attached, that he, which you, my young friends, if you have Prince Eugene, worked too hard; that been, as I know many of you have been, his life was too monotonous, that he should faithful to your opportunities, will carry throw aside business at 6 o'clock, and pass with you from these schools, a taste for the rest of the evening in the company of reading, a relish for the pleasures of the his youthful wife; and writing to her he mind-with a few well-chosen books-the says, "I am going to send you"-what sense to converse rationally on the import- think you, my young friends, the great ant topics of the day-the ability to en- Napoleon promises to send to his young tertain the family circle with an hour's step-daughter, the daughter herself of a reading of an interesting volume aloud-a king-not ornaments of gold and silver little domestic music, vocal and instrumen--diamonds and pearls-no, "I am going tal, such as has charmed us this afternoon, to send you a nice little library." these will do more to make a happy home, than a lucky speculation in stocks or a profitable contract in business. These, my dear young friends, are the keys which open the inmost shrine of the temple of earthly felicity, and they are almost exclusively in the hands of your sex.

But it is time to check myself, and, repeating the expression of the great pleasure with which I have listened to the various exercises of the day, and offering you, my dear young friends, my best wishes, to give way to the gentlemen around me, whom you are all desirous to hear.

From the Dublin University Magazine.

THE SCIENCE AND TRADITIONS OF THE SUPERNATURAL.

MAGIC, SORCERY, AND WITCHCRAFT.

THE wide and full view of nature and | its operations enjoyed by our first parents was probably much contracted after their fall, and only descended in a fragmentary manner to their posterity. After the flood, this treasure, diminished and broken up, was far from being common property to the sons of the children of Noah. It remained in greatest fullness among the

heads of families of the descent of Heber; and, when idolatry, began to prevail, it continued in an inferior and perverted form among the Assyrian and Egyptian priests. Among them were known, or believed to be known, all means by which knowledge of present and future things, and of the cure of diseases, could be innocently obtained, or evilly wrung from

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spiritual powers. This knowledge got in time the name of magic, for which different derivations have been given. Priestly knowledge" is probably the best equivalent. When any one gifted with a portion of this science chose to exert it for the mere attainment of power or temporal possessions, or for the destruction or harm of others, he was looked on as a malignant sorcerer or witch would be in modern times. Sir Edward Bulwer, who has made magic, in its use and abuse, his particular study, has well individualized the higher class of sages in the noble-minded Zanoni, and the evildisposed professors in Arbaces, priest of Isis, and the poison-concocting witch of Vesuvius.

There were at all times individuals tormented with a desire to penetrate the designs of Providence, the cause and mode of natural processes ever before their eyes, the dark mysteries of life, and of the union of mind and matter, and they ardently longed that these deep and inexplicable arcana should become intelligible to their intellect.

These classes of men saw within the range of their mental and bodily faculties no means of gratifying their wishes. Unblessed with patience or acquiescence in the Divine Will, or faith in the power, or confidence in the goodness of the Creator, they determined on devising some means to oblige those beings whose presence can not be detected by bodily organs, to be their guides through the labyrinth which they never should have thought of entering. From Zoroaster to the man who subjects household furniture to sleight-of-hand tricks, all professors and disciples of forbidden arts are obnoxious to be ranged in one of these categories.

It would take us out of our way to examine the various processes through which the clear insight, accorded to our first parents of the relation in which all creatures stand to the Creator, passed in degenerating to the worship of created things, human passions, the functions of nature, and the souls of departed heroes. It is merely requisite for our purpose to say that the heavenly bodies, so mysteri ous in their unapproachableness, and in their motions, and the undoubted influence of the apparently largest two on the condition of the parent earth, became chief objects of adoration. The prolific

earth, which appeared to give birth to all
living beings, to furnish them with food,
and all things essential to their existence,
and in whose bosom all seek their final
rest, was the loved, the genial Alma
Mater. Her hand-maidens, the subtle
and (as was supposed) simple elements,
the water, the fire, and the air, came in
for their measure
of worship. The
original notion of the heavenly messengers
and guardian angels become deteriorated
in time to that of demons or genii. Our
modern verse-makers, when mentioning
the genius of Rome, the genius of Cæsar,
etc., scarcely reflect that what to them is
a mere poetic image, was an existing,
potent being to the contemporaries of the
Tarquinii, the Fabii, and the Julian family.

As has been observed, nothing evil was necessarily connected with the word magic. The Persian Magi were well qualified to rule their subjects by their superior attainments in science. They sacrificed to the gods; they consulted them on their own affairs, but particularly as to the issue of events pregnant with the weal or woe of their people. The Egyptian priests were depositories of all the knowledge that had survived the dispersion at Babel in a fragmentary form. Both priests and Magi had recourse to rites in presence of the people for the foreknowledge of future events. This, in fact, formed a portion of the state religion; but an acquaintance with more recondite and solemn ceremonies, which they practiced in secret, was carefully kept from the commonalty.

While the Greeks and Romans paid divine honors to Jupiter and Juno, or their doubles, Zeus and Héré, and the other divinities, great and less great, some tradition of the primeval truth held its ground among the more intelligent, and the existence of a Supreme Ruler was acknowledged. With some Destiny was chief ruler, and an uneasy feeling was abroad that Jove would be deprived of power some day. It was the same in the Scandinavian mythology. The giants and the wolf Fenris were to prevail against the Esir, though themselves were, in turn, to perish also, and after this twilight of the gods the world was to be renewed under the sway of the AllFather.

Nearly every thing in the mythologies was a corruption, or a distortion, or shadow