never failed to rise up, wherever in the world such instruction has elevated the general mind. This fact confirms the responsibility of teachers.

An additional happy effect of popular education, evincive of the responsibility of teachers, is an elevation of the literary and professional classes.

If Dr. Johnson intended, by the often quoted assertion, "That knowledge in Scotland is like bread in a besieged city, affording each person a mouthful and no man a full meal," to intimate that its general diffusion was what rendered it impracticable to get a full meal, he was certainly erroneous.

The higher the general mass of a community is raised in intellectual culture, the more fully and ardently the deserving efforts of the literary and professional classes are welcomed and appreciated, and consequently the more substantial and hearty the encouragement given to their labors.

The greater the intelligence, and the more refined the taste, on the part of the readers and listeners of the people, the more intellectual and tasteful the productions which they will demand from those who write and speak for them.

As it requires more intellectual power and more delicacy of taste to make a book and a speech, than to understand and appreciate them; and as, on this account the writers and speakers of a community must always stand at several degrees of elevation above the general mass, every elevation of the common people by education pushes proportionably upward literary and professional men. All must have observed that an improvement of a congregation in intellectual character and literary taste are invariably answered to from the pulpit, by a greater richness of thoughts, an appeal to deeper motives, and a chaster and loftier eloquence. The more cultivated the courts and juries, the more argumentative, classical and effective the eloquence of the bar. The more instructed and discerning the electors of the country, the more intellectual, and sound, and brilliant the eloquence of our legislative assemblies. Having no patronage of princes or of aristocratic estates in this country, literary efforts, to a great extent, must grow up from the wants, the demands and the encouragements of the common people; increase all these and you give new richness and new power to the productions of those who minister intellectual nutriture to the general mind.

Another effect of popular education, closely allied to the one just considered, and well worthy of mention as proof of the literary responsibility of teachers, is an elevation of the mass of the people to an intellectual position, where they may feel a stronger influence from books and educated men.

There is, among the shoals of publications with which the press is groaning, and teeming, and disgorging itself, a respectable portion of works well adapted to instruct and refine the population; but, for want of that taste and appreciation produced by general education, great numbers derive little or no advantage from them. Their dull susceptibilities are not reached, no matter how important and useful the subjects of these books, no matter how richly fraught they may be with good things, or how brilliant with illustrations. They are all as the nightly heavens with all their glories to a world asleep. For the same reason the acquisitions, tastes, mental habits, professional and conversational exhibitions of educated men, upon multitudes, produce little effect. Their minds are below the region of their natural influence.

The productions and exhibitions of intellect; the useful knowledge and practical science lodged in the minds of the desultory and self-educated; the thoughts that float in newspapers, pamphlets, and larger periodicals; the discussions contained in public speeches, popular orations, and itinerant lectures; the weekly pulpit services; the valuable printed books; all produce effect upon the people in proportion as their education shall bring them up to a suitable mental sympathy and appreciation. There is a blessed sunshine upon the tops of the high forest trees; when the smaller trees and shrubs thrust up their heads to the same height, they will feel the general warmth.

The business of school teachers is to bring up the people to the elevated place where salutary intellectual influences will reach and bless them. Their responsibility is one of very interesting character.

The effect of a cultivation of the understanding on moral character is too important to be overlooked in estimating the responsibility of teachers in reference to popular education.

I am aware that the old favorite doctrine, that the head influences the heart, that the culture of the intellect softens the affections, is by many given up as an exploded one. It occurs to us all, that the barbarous age of a people is often more vir

tuous than its succeeding cultivated one; that the corruptions and crimes, which proved the ruin of Greece and Rome, were contemporary with their intellectual ascendency.

The names of Mirabeau and Voltaire are immediately suggested to us, men of well cultivated minds, but of abandoned morals. It is admitted that highly educated communities are sometimes luxuriant in crime; that many men have appeared and by some of their productions become the ornament of their country and age, whose hearts were rotten to the core. But such communities and such men are proofs, not that intellectual cultivation and refinement have no softening and reforming power, but that the depraved passions of men have greater power. Many, however, are ready to remind us here that intellectual pursuits and acquisitions, instead of meliorating the heart, are oftentimes made the means and incentives to vice. We remind them in turn that, in consequence of an internal disease in the physical system, the nutritious matters received into the stomach are frequently taken up and perverted to nourish the morbid excrescence, so that the patient pines and dies. But must we give up, on this account, our system of dietetics and believe our markets are filled with poisons? This was not the natural influence nor the general influence of the same articles of food. Neither is it the natural nor the general tendency of intellectual cultivation to demoralize, though it may be so perverted as to increase moral evil. The natural and general effect, no doubt, is to encourage all the amiabilities of our nature. Even those persons, whose depravities have done most to counteract and pervert their intellectual advantages, occasionally show that a refined understanding has made favorable impressions too deep to be wholly obliterated by opposing influences. He, who could pour forth from his foul mind the numbers of Don Juan, and introduce almost every where a dark misanthropy, and a contempt for revealed religion, which, amid and beneath the richness of his beauty and the power of his conceptions look like the creeping serpent in paradise, wrote the Prisoners of Chillon, the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and other pieces in the same spirit, which none read without admiration.

He, whose mind was impure and noisome enough to give birth to "January and May," and other similar profane and loathsome things, produced the Dying Christian, which has "lent wings" to many a freed spirit as it passed away. The volup

tuous Moore wrote the "Sacred Melodies," which would do honor to the purest heart. The profligate Sterne, besides the story of Lefevre, wrote the sermons entitled "Pursuit of Happiness," "a Good Conscience," " the Prodigal Son," and the "Good Samaritan," which would never lead to the suspicion that the author's heart was deficient in moral and religious feeling of the purest character. Do not these specimens of just sentiments and fine moral feeling from the authors of productions of so opposite a character, show the ascendency which intellectual refinement at some favored hours have gained over their corrupt sensualities?

The affections of the heart are fed and moulded by the objects presented to them through the ministry of the understanding. It is the business of education to lodge in the mind valuable truths and to train its powers to discover valuable truths. These will become objects for the heart, and, being themselves excellent, from their nature must exert ennobling influences on the moral feelings.

The pursuit of knowledge has a tendency to detain persons from profligate society; to furnish that excitement thirsted for by all, which, otherwise, would be sought for in scenes of dissipation; to make the heart revolt at the grossness of vice, and respond to the delicacy and beauty of virtue. It is true also that every intellectual inquiry leads up to the great standard of moral excellence for the universe. He, who studies at all, finds himself therefore, in the presence of God, with a specimen of his handiwork, a proof of his goodness, or a revelation of his design, directly under his eye. The moral effect of such contemplations must be of the safest and happiest character.

The whole natural influence of that education, which employs, expands and enriches the intellectual powers, must ever be to improve the heart.

There are sources of greater power on moral character; but when we contemplate the children and youth of the country gathered into schools and placed under the influence of a judicious and efficient cultivation of their mental faculties; when we think of them under these advantages at the susceptible and forming period of their existence, and before the world has had full opportunity to corrupt them, a bright vision of good opens before us. Who does not perceive that the effect on their moral character will be great and permanent, and immeasurably val

uable? The business of teaching has a commensurate importance and responsibility.

3. Besides these considerations establishing the responsibility of teachers generally, there are several peculiarities in the condition of the inhabitants of this country which impose upon American Teachers a special responsibility.

One peculiarity with us, increasing the obligations of our teachers, is the fact that here more of the whole number of children are placed under their tuition, and these for a longer time than is usual in other communities. Wherever rank and wealth make wide distinctions between the different classes of society, many, through straitened circumstances, are compelled to withdraw their children at an early age, from the schoolhouse to the workshop and the farm. In the manufacturing and raising districts of England, in consequence of the slender means of subsistence, many children are not taught at all, and those who are sent to school, seldom enjoy the opportunities of education after the seventh or eighth year. In America, through the great equality in the distribution of property, and the facilities afforded to all to obtain a pecuniary competency, the advantages of education might easily be offered to nearly all the children of the country until the age of fourteen or sixteen years. In many sections of this country the children, with very few exceptions, are actually placed under elementary instruction up to this period. In our manufactories, it is true, the greater value of children's labor always operates as a temptation to contract their time at school. As, however, these establishments are yet comparatively few in this country, and as, in consequence of liberal wages, there is no want of pecuniary ability among manufacturers, the instances of limited opportunity for education among this class of the community are not numerous enough to require any deduction from the general statement just made. Taking the whole population into the account, it is true, as was asserted, that in this country more of the whole number of children are committed to the training of teachers, and for a longer time, than is done in any other part of the world. American teachers should feel themselves called upon to meet this favorable peculiarity in our condition with extraordinary exertions. If, to whom much is given, of them much may justly be required; if the fabric returned must bear a proportion to the furnished raw material, and the time occupied in making and perfecting it, then are they responsible