424 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



tended to encourage the development of this species of 

 talent, the objection is sufficiently answered by saying that, 

 in the case of most of the American statesmen of the 

 Revolution, as well as of many of later date, private wealth 

 has supplied the place of public provisions for the attain- 

 ment of knowledge. In the period of our colonial history, 

 the sons of wealth}^ families were often educated in the best 

 schools of Europe, and the framers of our Constitution 

 were chiefly men of high education and elegant attainments. 

 Jefferson, whose writings are canonical with the democracy, 

 had the best private library in America, and was a man of 

 multifarious, if not of profound learning. The State papers 

 of that remarkable era are, with few exceptions, obviously 

 productions of men not merely of inspired genius or of 

 patient thought, but of laborious acquisition ; and they are 

 full, not of that cheap learning which is proved by pedantic 

 quotation, but of that sound discipline which is the un- 

 equivocal result of extensive reading and diligent research. 

 "Who have been the men, in all ages that have exercised the 

 widest and most permanent influence both on the moral 

 and physical well-being of man ? The spirit of the crusades 

 was roused by the preaching of a thoughtful solitary : Colum- 

 bus was a learned scholar, and Luther but a studious monk. 

 Watt, the great improver of the steam engine, was a man of 

 curious and recondite learning. Bonaparte was carefully 

 educated at the school of Brienne, and was through life a 

 liberal patron of learning and the arts. The glorious rebel- 

 lion of 1649 was the work of men of the closet ; and Milton, 

 who to our shame is less known among us by his prose than 

 by his poetry, was its apostle. Our own independence was 

 declared and maintained by scholars, and all men know 

 that the French revolution had its germ in the writings of 

 the Encyclopaedists. All men, in fact, who have acted upon 

 opinion, who have contributed to establish principles that 

 have left their impress for ages, have spent some part of 

 their lives in scholastic retirement. It is this very point — 

 the maintenance of principles discovered and defended by 

 men prepared for that service by severe discipline and labor- 

 ious study — that so strikingly distinguishes the English 

 rebellion of 1649 and our own Eevolution from most other 

 insurrectionary movements, and particularly from the 

 French revolution. The English and American statesmen 

 of those two periods were contending for truths, the French 

 atheists and philosophers for interests ; the former sought to 

 learn their duties, the latter concerned themselves only about 



