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 484 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

impossible, indeed, to remain long in the present state of things, since everyone may now set up a shop for education, as he would a shop for broadcloth."' "I feel called upon to organize a system of education for the new generation, such that both political and moral opinions may be duly regulated thereby."' " It seems to me that the special and the private schools ought all to be united, and brought under the cognizance of the educa- tion corps, which body ought to be so constituted as to have under its eye every child from the age of nine years." ^ And this "corps" was to be "an order, not of Jesuits whose head resides at Rome, but of Jesuits whose sole ambition shall be to make themselves useful, and who shall have no interest separated from that of the public."* Webster, in his Plymouth oration, said : " By general instruction we seek as far as possible to purify the whole atmosphere, to keep good sentiments upper- most, and to turn the strong current of feeling and opinion, as well as the censures of the law and the denunciations of religion, against immorality and crime." Elsewhere he terms the public schools "a wise and liberal system of police, by which property and the peace of society are secured." In Macaulay's view, "whoever has a right to hang has a right to educate." "The gross ignorance of the common people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property. Therefore it is the duty of the government to take care that the common people shall not be grossly ignorant." "By some means government must pro- tect persons and property. If you take away education, what means do you leave ? . . . . You leave guns and bayonets, stocks and whipping-posts, treadmills, solitary cells, penal colo- nies, gibbets." 5

There are some to whom the spectacle of the modern secu- lar state carefully and deliberately disengaging its vital interests from the ancient body of beliefs, to which they have so long been attached,* recalls the reckless song in F"aust, " Ich habe

■ Pelet, Napoleon in Council, p. 206.

' [hid., p. 199. ^ Ibid., p. 209. * Ibid.y p. 200.

'Speech on Education, April 18, 1847.

'See Pearson, National Life and Character, chap. iv.