Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/396

Rh of the Western Wilderness, where school-books lie open before the ragged children, which convey the mind over the whole world, and where the noblest pearls of American and English literature are to be found. I have talked with Horace Mann—the man of immeasurable hope, and I have thence derived great hope for the intellectual and moral perfecting of the human race, and for its future in this portion of the world. For that which is in the north-eastern States, in the oldest homes of the Pilgrims, the same will be sooner or later in the South and the West. A great and living intelligence in the popular mind mixes itself up more and more in the great question of popular education, and goes onward conquering like a subtle power of nature, a stream of spiritual life forcing a way for itself through all impediment. Would you hear how it speaks through its most powerful representative in the New World?

Thus writes Horace Mann in his invitation to the National Convention of the friends of Education, in August, 1850.

“A few considerations will serve to show that there never has been a period in the history of man when universal education was so imperative a duty as at the present moment. I mean education in its most comprehensive and philosophic sense, as including the education of the body, the education of the mind, and the education of the heart.

“In regard to the first topic, it is well known that physical qualities are hereditary. Disease and weakness descend from parent to offspring by a law of nature, as names descend by a law of custom. God still ordains that the bodily iniquities of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. When we look backward and see how the numbers of our ancestors are doubled at each remove in the ascending scale, it affrights us to reflect how many confluent streams from vicious fountains may have been poured into the