Vermont Watchman And State Journal

In Prussia, the Government provides the means of education and compels the people to bestow it upon their children. Prisons are built at public expense to punish the vicious and refractory. Schools are erected with the more laudable view of preventing those crimes which prisons are merely designed to punish. The Government is surely right in establishing the means of checking wickedness, as well as in erecting places for confining those who are already its victims. In this respect despotic Prussia is much in advance of some of the American States. It would be well if all the State authorities in the Union should not merely establish schools, but compel the inhabitants to use their advantages. There would then be fewer prisons, but more school houses. Instead of so much vice, there would then be a large addition to the stock of public and private virtue. Society, surely, would be the gainer by it.

Philadelphia North American.