In this whole enterprise, its undertakers should resolve to be convinced by no sneers, daunted by no difficulties, arrested by no obstacles. Difficulties and obstacles enough, indeed, will present themselves to the timid or superficial glance; but they will vanish, before calm scrutiny and brave determination. Even where the means of solving or removing them may not occur before hand to the mind, what was lately said in a worse cause, will prove to be true: "Where there is a WILL, there is a WAY." In such a cause as ours, and in reference to the epithets of "visionary," "impracticable," "chimerical," "Quixotic," and all the other imaginary lions which will be discovered in our path, well may we say, with the generous confidence of Lord Chatham, that we "trample upon impossibilities."
Has not our success, indeed, been already demonstrated? Demonstrated, in the first place, by unnumbered instances of parallel, and more stupendous enterprises, accomplished under circumstances less favorable than those which attend our undertaking? Such enterprises as the Reformation of Luther—the settlement of America—her deliverance from a foreign yoke—the teaching of the blind and the dumb18 to read and to write? Demonstrated, again, by actual experiment, that sovereign test of practicability—experiment, seven times repeated, with extensive, if not complete success—in New York, in Connecticut, in Massachusetts, in Austria, in Germany, in Prussia, in Scotland? Yes—it is no untried path we are called to tread: scarcely a step of the way, but has been explored and smoothed before us. All that we have to do, is to look around—see what others have done—correct our own procedure by what we perceive defective in theirs—and forthwith open the floodgates of light, and bid the torrent pour.
18 Dr. Johnson, after having witnessed the surprising performances of the pupils in a College for the deaf and dumb at Edinburgh in 1773, concluded that such a triumph over an infirmity apparently irremediable, left nothing hopeless to human resolution. "After having seen the deaf taught arithmetic," says he, "who would be afraid to cultivate the Hebrides?" Journey to the Western Islands.
Young gentlemen, foster-sons of the venerable institution near us! Some, if not all of you, are destined by your opportunities, and by bosoms glowing with honorable ambition, and beating high with the consciousness of talent, for a conspicuous part in the drama of life. Your eyes, doubtless, have already often glanced around, to see in what field you shall reap the harvest of wealth, respect, and fame, which hope represents as awaiting you. The buzz of notoriety, the palm of eloquence, the gorgeousness of office—those glittering bribes, which have lured onward their tens of thousands to mere splendid misery or to a shameful end after all—have, no doubt, displayed their attractions to you: but permit me to suggest, that if you will devote the powers with which nature and education have gifted you, to the patriot task of purifying and expanding the minds of your countrymen—besides enjoying in your latter days that sweetest of earthly thoughts, the thought of a life spent in usefulness—you may have gathered laurels of glory, compared with which, all the chaplets ever won in the tilt-yard of vulgar ambition are paltry weeds.
My wealthy fellow citizens! remember, that where suffrage is nearly universal and the majority rules, if the great body of the people be ignorant or immoral, property is never secure from assaults, under the disguise of law: either agrarian schemes, or oppressive protecting systems, or advantages to certain classes, or some form of unequal taxation; all, the result of ill-informed minds, or of depraved dispositions. And if lawlessness assume not the garb of legislation, still it is always banded with ignorance in the firing of barns, the destruction of labor-saving machinery,19 conspiracies to raise wages, and all the terrific outrages that spring from the fury of mobs. Thus, by a wise Providence, are you, who are the most able to promote the education of the people, also by far the most interested in doing so. If there can be a case, in which a judicious liberality is the truest economy, that case is now yours: and never may the ill husbandry of niggardliness be more awfully exemplified, than by your grudging a small particle of your wealth, to place the remainder beyond the reach of this peril.
19 No one can have forgotten the ravages committed, a year or two since, by the ignorant poor of Kent, and some others of the southern and middle counties of England, chiefly under the delusive idea, that their sufferings were caused by labor-saving machinery.
My fellow citizens (if any such are before me) who do not possess wealth, and who have scarcely tasted of the cup of knowledge! You surely need no exhortation to quaff freely of that cup, when it shall come within your grasp: but I do exhort you to employ your influence as men, and your constitutional power as voters, in persuading your fellow citizens, and in prompting your public agents, to adopt the requisite measures for dispelling, now and forever, the clouds and darkness in which republican freedom can never long live.
And if, at the remotest point of future time, to which we may look forward as witnessing the existence of human government any where, our democratic forms shall still retain, unimpaired, even their present purity, and present fertility of substantial freedom and happiness; much more, if they shall have waxed purer, and stronger, and more fruitful of good, with each revolving century,—defying the power or conciliating the love of foreign states—maintaining domestic harmony—oppressing none, protecting all—and so fully realizing the fondest hopes of the most sanguine statesman, that no "despair of the republic" can trouble the faintest heart:—all will be owing (under Providence,) to the hearkening of this generation and the succeeding ones, to that voice—not loud, but solemn and earnest—which, from the shrine of Reason and the tombs of buried commonwealths, reiterates and enforces the momentous precept—"ENLIGHTEN THE PEOPLE!"