books and stationery from the school fund.  Under this system, we have no children who do not acquire sufficient school learning to qualify them for transacting all the business which is necessary in the ordinary pursuits of life.  A child growing up without school learning would be an anomaly with us.  All standing thus on a level, as to advantages, talent is developed, wherever it happens to be; and neither wealth nor ancestral honors give any advantage in the even-handed contest which may here be waged for distinction.  It is thus that we find, almost uniformly, that our first men, either in government or the professions, are the sons of comparatively poor and obscure persons.  In places where the wealthier portion of the community have placed their children in select schools, they are found much less likely to excel, than when placed in contact and collision with the mass, where they are compelled to come in competition with those whose physical condition prepares them for mental labor, and whose situation in society holds forth every inducement to their exertions.  To this system, which is co-eval with the foundation of the State, I attribute, in a great degree, that wonderful energy of character which distinguishes the people of New England, and which has filled the world with the evidences of their enterprise.”

The preceding statements refer to New England, the oldest portion of the free States.  The more recently settled Northern and Western States are necessarily less advanced, yet their educational statistics would probably bear comparison with any country in the world, except the most favored portion of their own.  In the slave States the aspect of things affords a striking contrast.  Not only is the slave population, with but few exceptions, in a condition of heathen barbarism, a condition which it is the express object of those laws of the slave States, forbidding, under the heaviest penalties, the instruction of the slaves, to perpetuate; but the want of common elementary education among large numbers of the privileged class is notorious.  Compare Virginia with Massachusetts,—­“The American Almanac for the year 1841, states, (page 210) there are supposed to be hardly fewer than 30,000 adult white persons in Virginia who cannot read and write!” An able writer gives the following facts.

“No one of the slave States has probably so much general education as Virginia.  It is the oldest of them—­has furnished one half of the Presidents of the United States—­has expended more upon her University than any State in the Union has done during the same time upon its colleges—­sent to Europe nearly twenty years since for her most learned professors; and in fine, has far surpassed every other slave State in her efforts to disseminate education among her citizens; and yet, the Governor of Virginia in his message to the legislature, (Jan. 7, 1839) says, that of four thousand six hundred and fourteen adult males in that State, who applied to the county