Faculty--Effects of the desired Extension--It would restore the
National Schools to the People of the Nation.

It is the right and duty of every Government to educate its people,
whatever the kinds or varieties of religion which may obtain among
them;--it is the right and duty of every parent to select, on his
own responsibility, his children's teacher, and to determine what his
children are to be taught;--it is the right and duty of every member
of the commonwealth to see that the commonwealth's money, devoted to
educational purposes, be not squandered on incompetent men, and,
in virtue of his contributions as a ratepayer, to possess a voice
with the parents of a country in the selection of its salaried
schoolmasters. There exist, on the one hand, the right and duty of
the State; there exist, on the other, the rights and duties of the
parents and ratepayers; and we find both parents and ratepayers
presenting themselves in the aggregate, and for all practical
purposes in this matter, as a single class, viz. the _householders_
of the kingdom. But as, in dealing with these in purely political
questions, we exclude a certain portion of them from the exercise of
the _political_ franchise, and that simply because, as classes, they
are uninformed or dangerous, and might employ power, if they
possessed it, to the public prejudice, so would we exclude a certain
proportion of them, on similar grounds, from the _educational_
franchise. In selecting, however, the safe classes of householders,
we would employ tests somewhat dissimilar in their character from
those to which the Reform Act extends its exclusive sanction, and
establish a somewhat different order of qualifications from those
which it erects.

In the first place, we would fain extend the educational franchise to
all those householders of Scotland who inhabit houses of their own,
however humble in kind, or however low the valuation of their
rental. We know not a safer or more solid, or, in the main, more
intelligent class, than those working men of the country who, with the
savings of half a lifetime, build or purchase a dwelling for
themselves, and then sit down rent-free for the rest of their lives,
each 'the monarch of a shed.' With these men we are intimately
acquainted, for we have lived and laboured among them; and very rarely
have we failed to find the thatched domicile, of mayhap two little
rooms and a closet, with a patch of garden-ground behind, of which