nor
too carefully discussed; and at the urgent request of not a few of our
better readers, we purpose examining it anew in a course of occasional
articles, convinced that its crisis has at length come, just as the
crisis of the Church question had in reality come when the late Dr.
M'Crie published his extraordinary pamphlet;{6} and that it must
depend on the part now taken by the Free Church in this matter,
whether some ten years hence she is to posses any share, even the
slightest, in the education of the country. We ask our readers
severely to test all our statements, whether of principle or of fact,
and to suffer nothing in the least to influence them which is not
rational, or which is not true.

In the first place, then, we hold with Chalmers, that it is
unquestionably the right and duty of the civil magistrate to educate
his people, altogether independently of the religion which _he
himself holds_, or of the religious differences which may unhappily
obtain among _them_. Even should there be as many sects in a country
as there are families or individuals, the right and duty still remain.
Religion, in such circumstances, can palpably form no part of a
Government scheme of tuition; but there is nothing in the element of
religious difference to furnish even a pretext for excluding those
important secular branches which bear reference to the principles of
trade, the qualities of matter, the relations of numbers, the
properties of figured space, the philosophy of grammar, or the form
and body which in various countries and ages literature and the
_belles lettres_ have assumed. And this right and duty of a Government
to instruct, rest, we hold, on two distinct principles,--the one
_economic_, the other _judicial_. Education adds immensely to the
_economic_ value of the subjects of a State. The professional and
mercantile men who in this country live by their own exertions, and
pay the income tax, and all the other direct taxes, are educated men;
whereas its uneducated men do not pay the direct taxes, and, save in
the article of intoxicating drink, very little of the indirect ones;
and a large proportion of their number, so far from contributing to
the national wealth, are positive burdens on the community. And on the
class of facts to which this important fact belongs rests the
_economic_ right and duty of the civil magistrate to educate.

His _judicial_ right and duty are founded on the circumstance, that
the laws whi