C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

[90] mistake as great as in the other. This is clear. Nothing unjust, nothing ungenerous, can be for the benefit of any person, or any thing. Short-sighted mortals may, from some seeming selfish superiority, or from a gratified vanity of class, hope to draw a permanent good; but even-handed justice rebukes these efforts, and with certain power redresses the wrong. The whites themselves are injured by the separation. Who can doubt this? With the law as their monitor, they are taught to regard a portion of the human family, children of God, created in his image, co-equals in his love, as a separate and degraded class; they are taught practically to deny that grand revelation of Christianity —the Brotherhood of Mankind. Their hearts, while yet tender with childhood, are necessarily hardened by this conduct, and their subsequent lives, perhaps, bear enduring testimony to this legalized uncharitableness. Nursed in the sentiment of Caste, receiving it with the earliest food of knowledge, they are unable to eradicate it from their natures, and then weakly and impiously charge upon their Heavenly Father the prejudice which they have derived from an unchristian school, and which they continue to embody and perpetuate in their institutions. Their characters are debased, and they become less fit for the magnanimous duties of a good citizen.

The Helots of Sparta were obliged to intoxicate themselves, that they might teach to the children of their masters the deformity of intemperance. In thus sacrificing one class to the other, both were degraded—the imperious Spartan and the abased Helot. But it is with a similar double-edged injustice that the School Committee of Boston have acted, in sacrificing the colored children to the prejudice or fancied advantage of the white.

Who can say that this does not injure the blacks? Theirs, in its best estate, is an unhappy lot. Shut out by a still lingering prejudice from many social advantages,—a despised class,—they feel this proscription from the Public Schools as a peculiar brand. Beyond this, it deprives them of those healthful animating influences, which would come from a participation in the studies of their white brethren. It adds to their discouragements. It widens their separation from the rest of the community, and postpones that great day of reconciliation which is sure to come.

The whole system of Public Schools suffers also. It is a narrow perception of their high aim, which teaches that they are merely to furnish to all the scholars an equal amount in knowledge, and that, therefore, provided all be taught, it is of little consequence where, and