quality, which distinguish the people and political systems of
America.

The purposes of a people are changeable and changing, but institutions
are inflexible; therefore these latter often outlast the ideas in which
they originated, or the ideas may be acting in other bodies or forms.
Institutions are the visible forms of ideas, but they are useful only
while those ideas are living in the minds of men. If an institution is
suffered to remain after the idea has passed away, it embarrasses rather
than aids an advancing people. Such are monastic establishments in
Protestant countries; such is the Church of England, as an institution
of religion and government, to all classes of dissenters; such are many
seminaries of learning in Europe, and some in America.

Massachusetts has had one living idea, from the first,--that general
intelligence is necessary to popular virtue and liberty. This idea she
has expressed in various ways; the end it promises she has sought by
various means. In obedience to this idea, she has established colleges,
common schools, grammar schools, academies, and at last the Normal
School.

The _institution_ only of the Normal School is new; the _idea_ is old.
The Normal system is but a better expression of an idea partially
concealed, but nevertheless to be found in the college, grammar school
and academy of our fathers. Nor have we accepted the institution so
readily from a knowledge of its results in other countries, as from its
manifest fitness to meet a want here. It is not, then, our fortune to
inaugurate a new idea, but only to clothe an old one again, so that it
may more efficiently advance popular liberty, intelligence and virtue.
And this is our duty to-day.

The proprieties of this occasion would have been better observed, had
his excellency, Governor Washburn, found it convenient to deliver the
address, which, at a late moment, has been assigned to me. But we are
all in some degree aware of the nature and extent of his public duties,
and can, therefore, appreciate the necessity which demands relief from
some of them.

Massachusetts has founded four Normal Schools, and at the close of the
present century she may not have established as many more, for she now
satisfies the just demands of every section of her territory, and
presents the benefits of this system of instruction to all her
inhabitants. The building we here set apart, and the school we now
inaugurate to the service of learning,