264 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



public is gone. Its shadow may remain with all the pomp and circumstance 

 and trickery of government, but its vital power will have departed." Speaking 

 further and pointing to their future he says : "In America, the demagogue may 

 arise, as well as elsewhere. He is the natural, though spurious growth of repub- 

 lics; and like the courtier he may, by his blandishments, delude the ears, and 

 blind the eyes of the people to their own destruction. If ever the day shall arrive 

 in which the best talents and the best virtues shall be driven from office by in- 

 trigue or corruption, by the ostracism of the press, or the still more unrelenting 

 persecution of party, legislation will cease to be national. It will be wise by 

 accident, and bad by system." 



Look about you! Even now the wheels of government are jarring. In a 

 valley, before whose annual wealth-producing qualities, the valleys of the Nile, 

 the Euphrates and the Amazon dwindle into utter insignificance, is heard in un- 

 mistakable portent, the cry of oppressive taxation. New parties, the mush-room 

 growths of an hour, spring full armed with all the fatuous principles of immediate 

 salvation into the arena of political strife. Designing leaders, with glittering pic- 

 tures of sudden reform, whose throats are hoarse with preaching the miraculous 

 deliverance of the dear people, are lashing the sea of popular feeling into waves 

 of excitement, that threaten to loose us from all the revolutionary landmarks. 

 Senates are disrupted over the appointment of a single officer. It is claimed that 

 with all our boasted freedom we have no power upon the high seas, and less than 

 our due prestige among the nations of the earth, and with all the civil questions 

 that arise from the conflicting interests of fifty millions of people demanding a 

 nicer adjustment, legislative bodies are thrown into fever-heat and days upon 

 days of discussion over the re-instatement of some military chieftain. 



And yet in a government where all good comes from the people, according 

 to a late census, over five and a half millions of persons over the age of ten years 

 could neither read nor write. Of our adult males seventeen per cent were illiter- 

 ate and of our adult females twenty three per cent. Again, fifty per cent of all 

 the criminals are deficient in education, and a high authority speaking of the 

 United States says that " One-third of all the criminals are totally uneducated, 

 four-fifths are practically uneducated, and the proportion of criminals from the 

 illiterate classes is at least ten-fold as great as the proportion from those having 

 some education." 



Statistics further show that " the proportion of paupers among illiterates is 

 sixteen times as great as among those of common education," and that an import- 

 ant relation exists between education and health. Think of it in a land where the 

 ballot is the only king, the balance of power is in the hands of the uneducated. 

 Our domain is wide, and in addition to our native iUiteracy, thousands of the 

 lower classes of other nations are crowding to the polls. Time was when there 

 was only the East and the North, now there is the West and the South ! Is self- 

 preservation a less primal law with nations that with individuals ? If public vir- 

 tue and citizenship rest upon the education of the masses, should not the State 



