d Schools,
were vagrants, or even thieves. Not unfrequently a visit is paid at the
school by a respectable young man, who proves to have been a wild and
troublesome scholar of former times."

Mr. Hill, Recorder of Birmingham, in a charge to the grand jury, made in
1839, speaking of the means of repressing crime, says: "It is to
education, in the large and true meaning of the word, that we must all
look as the means of striking at the root of the evil. Indeed, of the
close connection between ignorance and crime the calendar which I hold
in my hand furnishes a striking example. Each prisoner has been examined
as to the state of his education, and the result is set down opposite
his name. It appears, then, that of forty-three prisoners only one can
read and write well. The majority can neither read nor write at all; and
the remainder, with the solitary exception which I have noted down, are
said to read and write imperfectly; which necessarily implies that they
have not the power of using those great elements of knowledge for any
practical object. Of forty-three prisoners, forty-two, then, are
destitute of instruction."

These authorities are not cited because they refer to schools that
answer in character to the public schools of Massachusetts, for the
latter are far superior in the quality of their pupils, and in the
opportunities given for intellectual and moral education; but these
cases and opinions are presented for the purpose of showing what has
been done for the improvement of children and the repression of crime
under the most unfavorable circumstances that exist in a civilized
community. If such benign results have followed the establishment of
schools of an inferior character, is it unreasonable to claim that
education and the processes of education, however imperfect they may be,
are calculated to increase the sum of human progress, virtue, and
happiness?

II. _Is the particular education given in the public schools unfavorable
to the morals of the pupils, and, consequently, to the morality of the
community?_ I have already presented a view of the moral and religious
education given in the schools, and it only remains to consider the
culture that is in its leading features intellectual. It may be said,
speaking generally, that education is a training and development of the
faculties, so as to make them harmonize in power, and in their relations
to each other. Among other things, the ability to read is acq