education would be promoted, and the number of criminals in the
community would be diminished. From the views and facts presented, as
well as from the daily observation and experience of men, I assume that
ignorance is the ally of crime, and that education is favorable to
virtue. It is also the result of experience and the dictate of reason
that general taxation is the only means by which universal education can
be secured. All other plans and theories will prove partial in their
application. If, then, it is the duty of the state to protect itself
against crime, and of course to diminish the number of criminals; if
education is the most efficient means for securing these results; if
this education must be universal in order to be thoroughly effective; if
the state is the only agent or instrumentality of sufficient power to
establish schools and furnish education for all; and if general taxation
is the only means which the state itself can command, is not every
inhabitant justly required and morally bound to contribute to the
support of a system of public instruction?

It will not necessarily happen that public schools will furnish to every
child and youth the desired amount of education. Professional schools,
classical schools, and academies of various grades, will be continued;
but there is an amount of intellectual and moral training needed by
every child which can be best given in the public school. This training
in the public schools ought to be carried much further than it usually
is. In the city of Newburyport, as I have been informed, there are no
exceptions to the custom of educating all the children of the town in
the public schools up to the moment when young men enter college. In
large towns and cities there is no excuse for the existence of private
schools to do the work now done in such schools as those of Newburyport
and other places where equal educational privileges exist.

The chief objection brought against the public school, touching its
morality, is derived from the fact that children who are subject to
proper moral influences at home are brought in contact with others who
are already practised in juvenile vices, if they have not been guilty of
petty crimes. I am happy to believe that this statement is not true of
many New England communities. The objection was considered in the last
Annual Report,--it has been often considered elsewhere; and I do not
propose to repeat at length the views which are