xliv REPORT—1850. , 
But when such an institution has been completed, the duties of the state 
to science are not exhausted. It has appreciated knowledge but in its 
abstract and utilitarian phase. For the peace and happiness of society, it 
would be of little avail were the great truths of the material world confined 
to the educated and the wise. The organization of science, thus limited, 
would cease to be a blessing. Knowledge, secular and divine, the πω 
current of the intellectual life-blood of man, must not merely descend 
through the great arteries of the social frame: it must be taken up by the 
minutest capillaries before it can nourish and purify society. Knowledge 
is at once the manna and the medicine of our moral being, When crime is 
the bane, knowledge is the antidote. Society may escape from the pesti- 
lence, and survive the famine; but the demon of ignorance, with his grim 
adjutants of vice and riot, will pursue her into her most peaceful haunts, 
destroying her institutions, and converting into a wilderness the paradise of 
social and domestic life. The state has, therefore, a solemn duty to per- 
form. As it punishes crime, it is bound to devise means for its prevention, 
As it subjects us to laws, it must teach us to read them; and while it thus 
teaches, it must teach also the ennobling truths which display the power 
and the wisdom of the great Lawgiver—thus diffusing knowledge while it 
is extending education, “and thus ‘making men contented, and happy, and 
humble, while it makes them quiet and obedient subjects. 
It is a great problem yet to be solved, to determine what will be the state 
of society when man’s physical powers are highly exalted, and his physical 
condition highly ameliorated, without any corresponding change in his 
moral habits and position. There is much reason to fear that every great 
advance in material civilization requires some moral and compensatory an- 
tagonism ; but however this may be, the very indeterminate character of the 
problem is a warning to the rulers of nations to prepare for the contingency 
by a system of national instruction, which shal either reconcile or disregard 
those hostile influences under which the people are now perishing for lack 
of knowledge. 
