Gazette Of The United States

EDUCATION.

Extract from the Charge of the Hon. Chief Justice PICKERING, to the Grand Jury, at the opening of the Supreme Judicial Court, at Dover, Sept. 14.

The [excuse] for not compelling a free and enlightened people to keep schools, namely, that he thought it impossible any could be guilty of so unnatural a barbarity. One would conceive it equally unnecessary to make a law requiring a parent to love his children; for the same affection, duly regulated, would prompt him to provide for their instruction; this is a duty every parent owes to his offspring—every citizen to his country—and every man to his God. If a child should be brought up without a common education, it is more than probable he must drudge through life, become a servant to all the dupe and sport of the crafty and designing. Though knowledge alone, may better the head more than the heart, yet, without it, the heart cannot be good. An early and good education is the most probable means to preserve a child from the devious paths of vice, and lead him in those of rectitude—
"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

Having glanced at the natural and moral consequences of this cruel neglect, let us for a moment advert to the political. If knowledge and learning, generally diffused through a community, be essential to the preservation of a free government, then the want of these, must inevitably prove its destruction. Where ignorance prevails, tyranny triumphs; for the truth of which we have the concurrent testimony of ancient and modern history, confirmed by our own observation. Can we then neglect the education of the rising generation, the hope of our land, when their and our all, so greatly depends upon it? Let us rouse from our supineness, and emulate each other in promoting the means, and cherishing the interest of literature! Did America ever need men of learning and knowledge more than at the present juncture! Or will the period shortly arrive, when she will no longer want such characters to fill the various departments in the national or state government?