Many years ago a very instructive fact on this point came under my own personal observation. A gentleman of my acquaintance had frequent need of the aid of a carpenter. The work to be done was not regular carpentry, but various odd jobs, alterations and adaptations to suit special wants, and no little time and materials were wasted in the perpetual misconceptions and mistakes of the successive workmen employed. At length a workman was sent who was a German, from the kingdom of Prussia. After listening attentively to the orders given, and doing what he could to understand what his employer wanted, Michael would whip out his pencil, and in two or three minutes, with a few rapid lines, would present a sketch of the article, so clear that any one could recognize it at a glance. It could be seen at once, also, whether the intention of his employer had been rightly conceived, and whether it was practicable. The consequence was, that so long as Michael was employed, there was no more waste of materials and time, to say nothing of the vexation of continued failures. Michael was not really more skilful as a carpenter than the many others who had preceded him. But his knowledge of drawing, gained in a common school in his native country, made his services worth from fifty cents to a dollar a day more than those of any other workman in the shop, and he actually received two dollars a day, when others in the same shop were receiving only a dollar and a quarter. He was always in demand, and he always received extra wages, and his work even at that rate was considered cheap.

What was true of Michael in carpentry, would be true of any other department of mechanical industry. In cabinet-making, in shoe-making, in tailoring, in masonry, in upholstery, in the various contrivances of tin and sheet iron with which our houses are made comfortable, in gas-fitting and plumbing, in the thousand-and-one necessities of the farm, the garden, and the kitchen, a workman who is ready and expert with his pencil, who has learned to put his own ideas, or those of another, rapidly on paper, is worth fifty per cent. more than his fellows who have not this skill.

The example of this man was brought vividly to my mind at a later day, in Philadelphia, when an important educational question was under discussion. Rembrandt Peale had two dreams, each worthy of his genius. One was to paint a Washington which should go down to posterity; the other was so to simplify the elements of the art of drawing that young boys and girls might learn it as universally as they learn to read and write. He spent long years in maturing a little work for this purpose, no bigger than a primer or a spelling-book, and a determined effort was made on the part of some of the friends of popular education to introduce the study into the primary public schools of Philadelphia. It was introduced into the High Schools. But its benefits were limited to a comparatively small number. The hope and the aim of the friends of Mr. Peale's project were to make the study an elementary one—to make a certain amount of proficiency in drawing a test of promotion from the lower schools to the schools above it. This would have placed "Graphics" alongside of the copy-book and the spelling-book. After struggling for several years with popular prejudice, the friends of the scheme were obliged to abandon it as hopeless. The idea was too much in advance of the times. Could the plan have succeeded, and could the entire youthful population of that great city, which is preëminently a mechanical and manufacturing centre, have grown up with a familiar practised skill in the use of the pencil, in ordinary, off-hand drawing, such as our friend Michael had, there can be no question that it would have added untold millions to the general wealth. If every boy and girl in that great metropolitan city were now obliged to spend as much time in learning to draw as is spent in learning to spell, and at the same age that they learn to spell, I do soberly believe that the addition to the wealth of the city, by the increased mechanical skill that would be developed, would be worth more than the entire cost of her public schools, although they do cost well-nigh a million of dollars annually.

What is true of drawing, is true of every branch and accomplishment necessary to a complete education. A man is educated when all his capacities bodily and mental are developed, and a community is educated when all its members are. Now if we could imagine two communities, of exactly equal numbers, and in physical circumstances exactly equal as to climate, soil, access to markets, and so forth, and if one of these communities should tax itself to the extent of even one-fourth of its income in promoting popular education, while the other spent not a dollar in this way, there can be little doubt as to which community would make the most rapid advances in wealth and in every other desirable social good.

We happen to have on this subject one most striking and significant record. In 1670, the English Commissioners for Foreign Plantations addressed to the Governors of the several colonies a series of questions concerning the condition of the settlements under their charge. One of these questions related to the means of popular education. The answers of two of the Governors are preserved. One of them, the Governor of Connecticut, ruled a territory to which nature had not been specially propitious. Its climate was bleak, its coast rockbound, its soil blest with only ordinary fertility. The other territory, Virginia, had an extraordinary amount of natural advantages. It had fine harbors, numerous navigable streams, a climate more temperate by several degrees than its rival, the soil in its lowlands and valleys unsurpassed in any of the Plantations for its capacity to produce wheat, corn, and tobacco, its mountains filled with untold treasures of lime, iron, and coal, (and, it now seems, with petroleum also,) and withal that wonderful variety of natural resources, which seems best suited to stimulate and reward the productive industry of its inhabitants.

The Governor of the less favored colony replied to the Royal Commissioners, as follows: "One-fourth of the annual revenue of the Colony is laid out in maintaining free schools for the education of our children." The policy thus early impressed upon the colony has been maintained with steadfast and almost proverbial consistency to this day, that region being known the world over as the land of schoolmasters. The Governor of the other colony replied, "I thank God, there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years." To this policy she also has until lately only too faithfully adhered. Now what is the result?

By referring to the tables accompanying the Census of 1860, we find the following significant facts.

  1. The average cash value of land was not quite $12 an acre in one commonwealth (Virginia), and a little over $30 an acre in the other.
  2. One commonwealth sustained only five inhabitants to every hundred acres of her soil, the other sustained eighteen inhabitants to every hundred acres.
  3. The value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the population, was in one commonwealth $496 to every inhabitant, in the other $965 to every inhabitant.
  4. The value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the acre, was in one commonwealth less than $26 to the acre, in the other more than $177 to the acre.

To which facts I may add, what is true, though not in the Census, it was the invention of Eli Whitney, a travelling schoolmaster from Connecticut, that has trebled the value of land in nearly every Southern State.

I have been endeavoring to show that popular education, though it is expensive, tends to national wealth. The argument is that an educated population is capable of producing greater material results than a population uneducated can produce. The example of Eli Whitney, just referred to, suggests the other line of argument, which I shall now notice briefly in conclusion. This second argument is, that the general diffusion of intelligence in a community tends to quicken invention, and leads to the discovery of those scientific principles and of those ingenious labor-saving machines, by which the productive power of the community is so greatly multiplied. The cotton-gin, the steam-engine, the sewing-machine, and the reaping-machine would never have been invented in a nation of boors. It is not asserted that every boy who goes to school will become an inventor. But it is as certain as the laws of mind and matter can make it, that inventions abound in a nation in proportion to its progress in science and the general spread of intelligence among the masses. Multiply common schools and you multiply inventions. How much these latter increase man's producing power, and so add to the aggregate of human wealth, it is needless to say. The invention of Watt alone has quadrupled the productive power of the whole human race. The aggregate steam-power of one single country, Great Britain, equals the muscular capacity for labor of four hundred millions of men—more than twice the number of adult males capable of labor on our planet. Its aggregate power throughout the earth is equal to the male capacity for manual work of four or five worlds like ours. The commerce, the navigation, the maritime warfare, the agriculture, the mechanic arts of the human race, have been revolutionized by this single invention not yet a century old.