kings? Or is it on the mind that God has stamped the imprint of a baser birth, so that the poor man's child knows with an inborn certainty that his lot is to crawl, not climb? It is not so. God has not done it. Men can not do it. Mind is immortal. Mind is imperial. It bears no mark of high or low, of rich or poor. It needs no bound of time or place, or rank or circumstance. It asks but freedom. It requires but light. It is heaven born, and it aspires to heaven. Weakness does not enfeeble it. Poverty can not repress it. Difficulties do but stimulate its vigor. And the poor tallow chandler's son that sits up all the night to read the book which an apprentice lends him, lest the master's eye should miss it in the morning, shall stand and treat with kings, shall add new provinces to the domain of science, shall bind the lightning with a hempen cord and bring it harmless from the skies. The common school is common, not as inferior, not as the school for poor men's children, but as the light and air are common. It ought to be the best school because it is the first school. . . .

Fellow-citizens, it is for you to say what shall be the present character, what shall be the future destiny of New Jersey. We have indeed a goodly heritage, but it has been long and shamefully neglected. We have undervalued our privileges. We have overlooked our duties. We have been content to be a pendent merely, when we ought to be an independent State. There is now, thank God, the sound as of a trumpet in the land that stirs the old heroic blood. We feel the remnant sparks of the forgotten fire which warmed our fathers' hearts. The spirit of the elder day is breathing on us with its quickening and invigorating power. Let us accept the omen. Let us obey the noble impulse. Let us arise to duty and to glory. Men of New Jersey, it is you that are to rise. You are the State. You create and you control the legislature. You enact and you sustain the laws. Yours is the influence. Yours is the work. State. Go on as you have now begun. The system of common schools which shall be adopted by the present legislature, take it into your own hands. If it is not what it should be, see that the next legislature make it such. Act together. Act with system. Act like men. The organization for the purpose is complete. The general committee, the committees of correspondence for the counties, the committees of the townships there is not an inch of ground that is not reached; there is not a citizen of New Jersey whose heart may not be roused by this electric chain.

Yours are the means. You make, you are the

321. A Rate-Bill and a Warrant for Collection

(Gregory, J. M., School Funds and School Laws of Michigan, 1859, pp. 290-93) The following forms were used in Michigan, and these may be considered as typical of all the New England States and of the

States to the westward to which New England people emigrated. That the collection of these small amounts was exceedingly vexatious must be evident.

Form of Rate-Bill and Warrant

Rate-Bill containing the name of each person liable for teachers' wages in District No......., in the township of......................., of........., for the term ending on......day of. . . . . . . ., A.D. 18.., and the amount for which each person not exempted from the payment thereof is so liable, with the fees of the assessor thereon.

You are hereby commanded to collect from each of the persons in the annexed rate-bill named, the several sums set opposite their respective names in the last column thereof, and within sixty days after receiving this warrant, to pay over the amount so collected by you (retaining five percent for your fees) to the order of the Director of said District, countersigned by the Moderator; and in case any person named therein, shall neglect or refuse, on demand, to pay the amount set opposite his name as aforesaid, you are to collect the same by distress and sale of goods and chattels of such persons wherever found, within the county or counties in which said District is situated, having first published such sale at least ten days, by posting up notices thereof in three public places in the townships where such property shall be sold.

At the expiration of this warrant, you will make a return thereof in writing, with the rate-bill attached, to the Director; stating the amount collected on said rate-bill, the amount uncollected, and the names of the persons from whom collections have not been made.

Given under our hands this..... day of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and .

in the year of

A. B., Director

C. D., Moderator.

322. Horace Mann on Religious Instruction in the Schools (Mann, Horace, Sequel to the so-called Correspondence between the Rev. M. H. Smith and Horace Mann. Boston, 1847)

In 1846 a Reverend Mr. Smith attacked the Massachusetts State Board of Education and its Secretary, Mr. Mann, in a sermon entitled "The Ark of God on a New Cart." In this sermon

he claimed that the increase in crime and immorality was due to the "Godless schools," sponsored by Mr. Mann and the State Board. Mr. Mann and the Reverend Mr. Smith exchanged two letters each on the question, and then Smith published the sermon and the correspondence in a book entitled The Bible, the Rod, and Religion in Common Schools. To this Mann published a Sequel, etc., of fifty-six pages, in which he judiciously examined the question at issue. He said he stood firmly for the reading of the Bible in the schools, but without comment; examined the matter in its different aspects; and in the concluding portion of the pamphlet said:

It is easy to see that the experiment would not stop with having half a dozen conflicting creeds taught by authority of law in the different schools of the same town or vicinity. Majorities will change in the same place. One sect may have the ascendency to-day; another tomorrow. This year there will be three Persons in the Godhead; next year but one; and the third year the Trinity will be restored to hold its precarious soyereignty until it shall be again dethroned by the worms of the dust it has made. This year, the everlasting fires of hell will burn to terrify the impenitent; next year, and without any repentance, its eternal flames will be extinguished, to be rekindled forever, or to be quenched forever as it may be decided at annual town meetings. This year, under Congregational rule, the Rev. Mr. So and So and the Rev. Dr. So and So will be on the committee; but next year these reverends and reverend doctors will be plain misters, never having had apostolic consecration from the bishop. This year the ordinance of baptism is inefficacious without immersion; next year one drop of water will be as good as forty fathoms. Children attending the district school will be. taught one way; going from the district school to the high school they will be taught another way. In controversies involving such momentous interests, the fiercest party spirit will rage, and all the contemplations of heaven be poisoned by the passions of earth. Will not town lines and school district lines be altered, to restore an unsuccessful or to defeat a successful party? Will not fiery zealots move from place to place, to turn the theological scale, as it is said is sometimes now done to turn a political one? And will not the godless make a merchandise of religion by being bribed to do the same thing? Can

aught be conceived more deplorable, more fatal to the interests of the young than this? Such strifes and persecutions on the question of total depravity as to make all men depraved at any rate; and such contests about the nature and the number of persons in the Godhead in heaven, as to make little children atheists on earth.

If the question, "What theology shall be taught in school?" is to be decided by districts or towns, then all the prudential and the superintending school committees must be chosen with express reference to their faith; the creed of every, candidate for teaching must be investigated; and when litigations arise and such a system will breed them in swarms an ecclesiastical tribunal, some star chamber, or high commission court must be created to decide them. If the governor is to have power to appoint the judges of this spiritual tribunal, he also must be chosen with reference to the appointments he will make, and so, too, must the legislators who are to define their power, and to give them the purse and sword of the State, to execute their authority. Call such officers by the name of judge and governor, or cardinal and pope, the thing will be the same. The establishment of the true faith will not stop with the schoolroom. Its grasping jurisdiction will extend over all schools, over all private faith and public worship, until at last, after all our centuries of struggle and of suffering, it will come back to the inquisition, the faggot, and the rack.

Let me ask here, too, where is the consistency of those who advocate the right of a town or a district to determine, by a majority, what theology shall be taught in the schools, but deny the same right to the State? Does not this inconsistency blaze out into the faces of such advocates so as to make them feel, if they are too blind to see? This would be true, even if the State had written out the theology it would enforce. But ours has not. It has only said that no one sect shall obtain any advantage over other sects by means of the school system, which, for purposes of self-preservation, it has established.

323. Petition for a Division of the School Funds (Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for Michigan, 1853, pp. 190–91)

The following petition to the Legislature of Michigan, in 1853, by the Catholics of Detroit, is typical of petitions of the time to Legislatures in other States. This petition contains an interesting sectarian definition of free schools and liberty in instruction. It was met with a counter-petition from the Protestant Episcopal Bishop for the Diocese of Michigan (R. 324), and the matter was threshed out before the Legislature. Committees of both the Senate and the House made reports opposing division, and the Legislature took no further action on the request.

Memorial to the Legislature relative to a division of the School Fund We, the undersigned, citizens of Michigan, respectfully represent to your Honorable Body, that we have labored, and are still laboring under grievances to which neither Justice nor Patriotism require longer submission on our part, without an effort for their removal.

We, your petitioners, wish to represent to your Honorable Body, that notwithstanding the Constitution guarantees liberty of conscience to every citizen of the State, yet our Public School laws compel us to violate our conscience, or deprive us unjustly of our share of the Public School Funds, and also impose on us taxes for the support of schools, which, as a matter of conscience, we cannot allow our children to attend.

To convince your Honorable Body of the magnitude of these grievances, we have but to refer you to the fact, that in the cities of Monroe and Detroit alone, there are educated at the expense of their parents, and charitable contributions, some 2500 of our children. Your petitioners might bear longer their present grievances, hoping that our fellow-citizens would soon discover the injustice done to us by the present School laws, and that the love of public justice for which they are distinguished, would prompt them to protest against laws which are self-evidently a violation of liberty of conscience, a liberty which is equally dear to every American citizen; but, as the new Constitution requires that free schools be established in every district of our State, and as the present Legislature will be called upon to act upon the subject, your petitioners consider that their duty to themselves, their duty to their children, and their duty to their country, the liberties of which they are morally and religiously bound to defend, as well as their duty to their God, require that they apprise your Honorable Body of the oppressive nature of our present School laws, the injustice of which is equalled only by the laws of England, which compel the people of all denominations to support a church, the doctrines of which they do not believe.

Your petitioners would not wish to be understood as being opposed to education; on the contrary they are prepared to bear every reasonable burden your Honorable Body are willing to impose on them, to promote the cause of education, providing that our schools be free indeed. But they do not consider schools free when the law imposes on parents the necessity of giving their children such an education as their conscience cannot approve of. But that your Honorable Body may not be ignorant of what they understand by free schools, your petitioners wish to say that in their opinions, schools can be free only, when the business of school teaching be placed on the same legal footing as the other learned professions, when all may teach who will, their success depending, as in other cases, on their fitness for their profession, and the satisfaction