t should not be itself a farmer; the State should
sustain honest handicraft, but it should not work at shoe-making or
tailoring, and bread-baking. So, in the same manner, the State should
promote and protect education, but it should not be itself a
school-master, and give instruction.

What a cry would be raised if the State erected State workshops, and
thereby ruined all other similar trades! Now the State does the same
thing, as far as possible, in regard to education. What an absurdity! In
our free country, State education has no more foundation in good sense
than the old sumptuary laws, that regulated the length of a boot or the
dimensions of a skirt.

If the State claims the right to educate our children, why does it not
just as well claim the right to nurse, feed, clothe, doctor, and lodge
them? Indeed these necessities are more indispensable, and must be
supplied to a considerable extent before education can be given at all.
Why should the State throw all these burdens on the parents, and assume
that of instruction? It cannot claim to know more of grammar than of
the art of nursing and cooking. It is even said that the tailor and
barber have more to do in fashioning the man than the school-master.

Again, how absurd is it not for the State to undertake to teach all
alike, without regard to their circumstances or prospects in life, the
same business. This scholastic equality soon ends, if it ever had a
reality. They cannot all expect to be Newtons, Humboldts, or La Places.
They cannot be all, nay, not one in ten thousand, "professors," or
"editors," or what not. We cannot, if we would, escape the sentence
imposed on our forefather in the garden: "Thou shalt eat thy bread in
the sweat of thy face." As well might the State claim that all the
children from seven to seventeen years of age should sit at the same
table, provided at public expense, and be served with the same food and
the same number of dishes. If the State (in order to prepare the rising
generation to make citizens, which must be its reason, if any) thinks it
necessary to prescribe a State education, it is equally important that
their food, and even their clothing, should be of the approved State
quality and pattern!!! All know that this was the old Lacaedemonian plan,
and how it ended history tells;--in ferocity, avarice, dishonesty and
disruption. All admit the folly and wickedness of forcing a people into
uniformity in matter of religion. Now it is