CHAP. XII.] SCHOOLS EARLY FOUNDED. 161 



to read, and that every township of fifty householders shall ap 

 point one to teach all the children.&quot;^ 



Very different was the state of things in the contemporary 

 colony of Virginia, to which the Cavaliers and the members of 

 the Established Church were thronging. Even fifteen or twenty 

 years later, Sir William Berkeley, who was governor of Virginia 

 for nearly forty years, and was one of the best of the colonial 

 rulers, spoke thus, in the full sincerity of his heart, of his own 

 province, in a letter written after the restoration of Charles II. : 

 &quot;I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope 

 we shall not have them these hundred years. For learning has 

 brought heresy and disobedience and sects into the world, and 

 printing has divulged them, and libels against the best govern 

 ment. God keep us from both.&quot;f 



Sir William Berkeley was simply expressing here, in plain 

 terms, the chief motives which still continue to defeat or retard 

 the cause of popular education in some parts of the United States 

 and in many countries of Europe, England not excepted a 

 dread of political change while the people remain in ignorance, 

 and a fear of removing that ignorance, lest it should bring on 

 changes of religious opinion. The New Englanders were from 

 the beginning so republican in spirit, that they were not likely to 

 share Governor Berkeley s apprehensions of a growing dislike to 

 &quot; the best of governments,&quot; as he termed the political maxims of 

 the Stuarts ; and if, for a time, they cherished hopes of preserv 

 ing uniformity of religious opinion, and even persecuted some who 

 would not conform to their views, their intolerance was of short 

 duration, and soon gave way to those enlightened views of civil 

 and religious freedom which they had always professed, even 

 when they failed to carry them into practice. 



If we contrast the principles before alluded to of the leading 

 men in Massachusetts with those of the more southern settlers, 

 in the early part of the seventeenth century, we learn without 

 surprise that at a time when there was not one bookseller s shop 

 in Virginia and no printing presses, there were several in Boston, 



* Bancroft, vol. i. p. 458. 



t Chalmers, cited by Graham, Hist, of U. S., vol. i. p. 103. 



