the
nation; and we cannot safely give them anything which approaches a
republican form of government, unless we allow the great mass of the
free people the right to vote. And least of all should we think of
proscribing that particular class of the free people who most thoroughly
represent in their localities the interests of the United States, and
whose ballots would at once do the work and save the expense of an army
of occupation.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Life of Horace Mann._ By his Wife. Boston: Walker, Fuller &
Co.

The American readers of Mr. Spencer's "Social Statics" have raised their
eyes in wholesome wonderment at the condemnation which is there found of
all systems of national education. It is unfortunate that a writer who
has given effective presentation to many truths should have failed to
scrutinize his inductions by the light of certain ascertainable facts.
The presumed requirements of a system caused him to prejudge what should
have been investigated; and hence, upon the great theme of state
education his rare illuminating powers shed a few side-lights of
suggestion, and nothing more. The rough common sense of our humblest
citizen disperses the philosopher's subtilties of logic with some such
decisive sentence as that with which Dr. Johnson cut the meshes of the
Fate-argument, or President Lincoln carried the pious defences of
man-stealing. "We know we're free, and there's an end on 't." "If
slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." If the state has no right to
educate, it has no right to protect itself from the assaults of
ignorance, and consequently no right to exist at all. This, to be sure,
is dogmatism; but with loyal Americans to-day it comes so near being a
moral instinct that it may be provisionally assumed and tested at
leisure by the experience to which it has conducted us. In the crisis
through which the nation has just passed, education as a state
expediency has received its fullest vindication. The people whom the
state educated up to an appreciation of the republican idea arose to be
its saviours. No magnetism of personal leadership was given them. It was
the instructed sense of the community which overcame the perils of
faction and the incompetence of chiefs. And now, while we gratefully
recognize those who at the critical moment fell or suffered or wrought
for the Republic, let us not forget the unapplauded heroism which in
time past laboriously accumulated t