CHAP. XXXVIL] POPULAR EDUCATION. 317 



must be allowed to communicate freely his thoughts 

 to others. Until they have been brought into the 

 daylight and discussed, they will never be clear even 

 to himself. They must be warmed by the sympathy 

 of kindred minds, and stimulated by the heat of con 

 troversy, or they will never be fully developed and 

 made to ripen and fructify. 



How, then, can we obtain this liberty ? There is 

 only one method ; it is by educating the millions, and 

 by dispelling their ignorance, prejudices, and bigotry. 



Let Pennsylvania not only establish numerous 

 free schools, but let her, when she organizes a system 

 of government instruction, raise the qualifications, 

 pay, and station in society of the secular teachers, as 

 highly as Massachusetts is now aspiring to do, and 

 the persecution I have complained of will cease at 

 once and for ever. 



The project of so instructing the millions might 

 well indeed be deemed Utopian, if it were necessary 

 that all should understand the patient and laborious 

 trains of research and reasoning by which we have 

 arrived at grand generalisations in geology, and other 

 branches of physical science. But this is not requi 

 site for the desired end. We have simply to com 

 municate the results, and this we are bound to do, 

 without waiting till they have been established for 

 half a century. We ought rather carefully to prepare 

 the public mind for new conclusions as soon as they 

 become highly probable, and thus make impossible 

 that collision of opinion, so much to be deprecated, 

 between the multitude and the learned. 



It is as easy to teach a peasant or a child that the 



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