clerical interests in opposition to popular rights.

Their country is perishing for lack of a knowledge which they cannot
supply. Every seven years--the brief term during which, if a
generation fail to be educated, the opportunity of education for ever
passes away--there are from a hundred and fifty to two hundred
thousand of the youth of Scotland added to the adult community in an
untaught, uninformed condition. Nor need we say in how frightful a
ratio their numbers must increase. The ignorant children of the
present will become the improvident and careless parents of the
future; and how improvident and careless the corresponding class which
already exists among us always approves itself to be, let our prisons
and workhouses tell. Our country, with all its churches, must
inevitably founder among the nations, like a water-logged vessel in a
tempest, if this state of matters be permitted to continue. And why
permit it to continue? Be it remembered that it is the _national_
schools--those schools which are the people's own, and are yet
withheld from them--and not the schools of the Free Church, which it
is the object of the Educational movement to open up and extend. Nor
is it proposed to open them up on a new principle. It is an
unchallenged fact, that there exists no statutory provision for the
teaching of religion _in them_. All that is really wanted is, to
transfer them on their present statutory basis from the few to the
many,--from Moderate ministers and Episcopalian heritors, to a people
essentially sound in the faith--Presbyterian in the proportion of at
least _six_ to one, and Evangelical in the proportion of at least
_two_ to one. And at no distant day this transference must and will
take place, if the ministers of the Free Church do not virtually join
their forces to their brethren of the Establishment in behalf of an
alleged ecclesiastical privilege nowhere sanctioned in the word of
God.{1}

There is another important item in this question, over which, as
already determined by inevitable laws, ecclesiastical votes, however
unanimous, can exert no influence or control. They cannot ordain that
inadequately paid schoolmasters can be other than inferior educators.
If the remuneration be low, it is impossible by any mere force of
majorities to render the teaching high. There is a law already 'voted
for' in the case, which majorities can no more repeal than they can
the law of gravitation. And here we must take t