COMMON -SCHOOL SYSTEM. 489 



nection with this trial are these two that four or five 

 persons of undoubted veracity should have sworn that 

 they saw Dr Parkraari after the time when he was alleged 

 to have been, and when he actually was, murdered ; and 

 that, in the face of such testimony, the jury should have 

 had the moral courage unanimously to pronounce him 

 guilty. As a moral evidence of the value of human 

 testimony, the former is very curious as to the mental 

 energy of a Boston jury, the latter is not less striking. 



A stranger from Europe cannot be in New England 

 long without hearing, if he has not been familiar with 

 the subject before, of its system of common schools a 

 system of which the parentage is claimed by the State 

 of Massachusetts. In regard to this system, now so 

 familiar to European minds, which is spreading over the 

 whole Union, and is exercising an influence over our 

 Cis-Atlantic systems, it is unnecessary to enter into 

 details. Two sentences from the report of Mr Horace 

 Mann upon their school-system seem to embody the 

 main reasons for its adoption by the people of New 

 England. In the one he says, &quot; Not only in the begin 

 ning, when God created the heavens and the earth, did 

 he say Let there be light; whenever a human 

 soul is born into the world, its Creator stands over it, 

 and again pronounces the same sublime words, Let 

 there be light. : In the other, &quot; that vast variety of 

 ways in which an intelligent people surpasses a stupid 

 one, and an exemplary people an immoral one, has in 

 finitely more to do with the wellbeing of a nation than 

 soil or climate, or even government itself, except so far 

 as government may prove to be the patron of intelli 

 gence and virtue.&quot; 



These sentences imply, that to impart mental light 

 to its citizens is the imperative moral duty of a common 

 wealth to make the people intelligent through education, 

 its first material interest. 



