AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 71 



Let this rapidly growing nation fully adopt the conviction that 

 if America must follow in the " decline and fall" of empires, 

 the result will be determined by her own suicidal hand. Navies 

 and standing armies, so necessary for the monarchical despotisms 

 of Europe cannot defend a people against itself. Here, the 

 people are their own rulers, and whatever be the moral, social 

 and even national attitude of the country, their intelligence and 

 morality has made it what it is. Education renders a standing 

 army unnecessary here as one of the permanent institutions of 

 the land, and education, had its influence been felt earlier in 

 Britain, would have rendered a standing army unnecessary there. 

 As it is, general education will prolong and stay their fall as the 

 want of it precipitated overgorged and all-conquering Rome. 

 You will find that those portions of your country that are most 

 ignorant are infested with the most noisy of demagogues, and if 

 it were possible that the United States could retrograde in the 

 work of general education, the altered character of her laws and 

 institutions would soon subject her to a worse subserviency, to a 

 more vivid and fearful struggle between classes than is now con- 

 vulsing the worn out despotisms of Europe ; the end being only a 

 question of time. Here then, is the true secret of national great- 

 ness. The question of general education is not one of many 

 among matters of social progress, it rises to the importance of 

 identification with the causes that have produced and shall per- 

 petuate your very existence as a nation. The moral suasion of 

 the bayonet, the convincing argument of cannon balls, may for 

 awhile rivet the chain that drags slavish millions at the chariot 

 wheels of prescriptive authority; there, where every crowned 

 head trusts to the strong arm of military power as its last its only 

 resort, such institutions may be demanded by the artificial circum- 

 stancts in whi-h both kings and people are placed. 



But, for this western cradle of renovated Liberty, while Maury 

 lifts the curtain and unfolds the stupendous drama of the ocean, 

 and Morse — men upon whose shoulders the mantle of a Franklin 

 has assuredly fallen — while spirits like these adorn your history 

 and render even the very elements of air and earth subservient 

 to human comfort — while the practical and useful are sought and 



