PROGRESS IN MATERIAL PROSPERITY. 249 



been adorned with the architecture and landscape gardening of 

 a prosperous and discriminating population. Her busy and 

 thriving villages arc a constant source of admiration ; and he 

 who knows them best will find it difficult to determine which to 

 admire most — the evident wealth of her thriving citizens or 

 their devotion to all measures of social reform and their high 

 domestic virtues. This increase in valuation and resource — this 

 constant struggle for material as well as moral and intellectual 

 advancement — are so generally diffused that no section or county 

 of the State can claim peculiar honor in this respect. But you 

 will pardon me if I turn with especial pride to my own county 

 of Essex, which advanced in valuation from 824,335,935, in 

 1830, to $84,637,837, in 1860 ; and whose products of industry 

 increased from $39,848,019, in 1855, to $81,107,926, in 1865. 

 Let this county not forget that to the fostering care of the Com- 

 monwealth she, as well as her sister counties, owe in a great 

 degree their development and success. Nearly $7,000,000 

 loaned to railroad corporations, including the Western, Eastern, 

 Norwich and Worcester, Troy and Greenfield and Southern Ver- 

 mont, have produced an effect far greater than even that pre- 

 dicted by the sagacious financiers and statesmen who led the 

 State into such enterprises. 



Passing over the four hundred and twenty thousand dollars 

 spent last year in charitable institutions, for the relief of the 

 unfortunate, and the three hundred and thirty-three thousand 

 dollars spent in checking and correcting crime, I call your par- 

 ticular attention to what is now going on and has been done for 

 the education of the people of this Commonwealth — a subject 

 peculiarly appropriate on this occasion. 



The education of youth in " literature and sound doctrine," 

 — intellectual, moral and religious culture — occupied the atten- 

 tion of the founders of our State. They had learned the im- 

 portance of this at home — from the experience of their own 

 firesides — from the dialectic necessities which attended noncon- 

 formism — from the obligation which every dissenter laid upon 

 himself to defend his faith — from the natural impulse of a mind 

 freed from civil and ecclesiastical bonds and left to its own inde- 

 pendent search for truth — from the declaration of the great 

 reformer, that " government, as the natural guardian of all the 

 young, has the right to compel the people to support schools." 



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