uld be flogged, like a beast of burden, to his daily task.
But the State had given him an education. That education was not, it is
true, in all respects what it should have been. But such as it was, it
had done more for the bleak and dreary shores of the Forth and the Clyde
than the richest of soils and the most genial of climates had done for
Capua and Tarentum. Is there one member of this House, however strongly
he may hold the doctrine that the Government ought not to interfere
with the education of the people, who will stand up and say that, in his
opinion, the Scotch would now have been a happier and a more enlightened
people if they had been left, during the last five generations, to find
instruction for themselves?

I say then, Sir, that, if the science of Government be an experimental
science, this question is decided. We are in a condition to perform the
inductive process according to the rules laid down in the Novum Organum.
We have two nations closely connected, inhabiting the same island,
sprung from the same blood, speaking the same language, governed by the
same Sovereign and the same Legislature, holding essentially the same
religious faith, having the same allies and the same enemies. Of these
two nations one was, a hundred and fifty years ago, as respects opulence
and civilisation, in the highest rank among European communities, the
other in the lowest rank. The opulent and highly civilised nation leaves
the education of the people to free competition. In the poor and half
barbarous nation the education of the people is undertaken by the State.
The result is that the first are last and the last first. The common
people of Scotland,--it is vain to disguise the truth,--have passed the
common people of England. Free competition, tried with every advantage,
has produced effects of which, as the Congregational Union tells us,
we ought to be ashamed, and which must lower us in the opinion of every
intelligent foreigner. State education, tried under every disadvantage,
has produced an improvement to which it would be difficult to find a
parallel in any age or country. Such an experiment as this would be
regarded as conclusive in surgery or chemistry, and ought, I think, to
be regarded as equally conclusive in politics.

These, Sir, are the reasons which have satisfied me that it is the
duty of the State to educate the people. Being firmly convinced of that
truth, I shall not shrink from proclaiming it here and