previous next

[373] be continued but greatly extended. If the State governments are not prepared nor willing to provide for the education of all classes (as I hope they will soon do), I recommend that the general Government take the matter in hand. “The safety of the Republic is the supreme law.” There can be no safety nor permanent peace where ignorance reigns. The law of selfpreservation will justify the national legislature in establishing through the Bureau of Education, or some other agency, a general system of free schools, and furnish to all children of a suitable age such instruction in the rudiments of learning as may be necessary to fit them to discharge intelligently the duties of free American citizens.

The foregoing comments and summary upon what was undertaken and accomplished, which were made forty years ago, are, I believe, of special interest today. Problems touching labor are always recurring.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: