CULTURE OF THE HEART, AFFECTIONS,
AND INTELLECT,

WHILE

LEARNING TO READ.

N

3

PART III.

This the first duty, carefully to train

The children in the way that they should go;

Then of the family of Guilt and Pain

How large a part were banish'd from below.

SOUTHEY.

BY THOMAS H. PALMER,

AUTHOR OF THE PRIZE ESSAY ON EDUCATION, ENTITLED THE
TEACHER'S MANUAL.."

BOSTON:

WILLIAM D. TICKNOR & CO.

Corner of Washington and School Streets.

1847.

1863. May 1.
Gift-of
George Livermore,
Gumtridge.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1842,
BY THOMAS H. PALMER,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Vermont.

STEREOTYPED BY

GEORGE A. CURTIS,

N. ENGLAND TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY, BOSTON

PREFACE.

NEVER, surely, was there a moment when the public mind was more fully awake than now to the importance of education. Men everywhere begin distinctly to see that it is easier to restrain vice by schools than by jails, and cheaper to endow seminaries than to support almshouses. They are also beginning to discover (how strange that the fact should ever have been overlooked!) that, in order to have good government, our governors, the people, must be enlightened; that a democracy like ours, based upon any thing but universal virtue and intelligence, must be unstable as water, uncertain as the wind.

But, although the truth of the general proposition is readily admitted, that the permanence of our free institutions depends upon the virtue and intelligence of the people, and that these can only be secured by a sound system of public instruction, yet how few are there who extend their views beyond intellectual education-who consider, that with all the boasted improvements of our public schools, we may actually have been doing little more than training up in them a set of accomplished rogues.

*

*Mr. Attorney-General Austin said publicly, that his professional experience convinced him, "that crime had increased with the increase of intellectual education. There is less violence there is more craft, subtlety, and over-reaching. A mayor of this city [Boston,] said with truth, 'that the march of mind alone was the rogue's march.'"