Public Schools.

Of all our public institutions, those devoted to popular education are the source of the most unmingled satisfaction and pride. It swells one's heart to feel that, in the midst of a war, in which for very national existence this people is contending on land and sea, the humblest child in Massachusetts may daily find an open door and an outstretched hand of welcome to all the uses and the delights of learning. The rebellion itself would have been impossible had a system of Free Schools pervaded the Union; for they would have lifted the people of the rebel States above the chance of those delusions, fed by ambitious, jealous, and despotic men, to whose wiles popular ignorance left them victims.

The average attendance of the teachers of Massachusetts at their Institutes, is reported to be larger by twenty during the last twelve months than in any former one of the seventeen years they have been held. The interest exhibited by the people in educational meetings has never been greater. The number of students in our Normal Schools and Colleges is believed to be diminished only by enlistments in the Army of the Union. And there they have lavished a contribution of devoted patriotism, not merely on field and line, but on rank and file, illumined

by intellect, and graced by culture.* Our Common Schools are the distributors of those gifts of learning, of which the higher institutions of literature and science are the reservoirs. Every intelligent laborer helps to weave, with cunning hand, into the warp and woof of all the wealth and uses of mankind the sublimest thought and the marvellous divinations of thinkers, discoverers and inventors. For happiness, for honor, for wealth and strength, as well as for duty, let us invest a generous portion of the inheritance in the undecaying riches of the intellect.

The policy of emancipation is the discovery of a new world. It will open fields of effort for every variety of gift. The untutored labor, the wasteful husbandry, the unskilful mechanism, the mines. unwrought, the waterfalls untamed, and all their boundless possibilities of development, invite your

The alumni and undergraduates of our colleges occupy every rank in the service, from those of General and Admiral, through every grade, including Surgeons and Chaplains, down to that of privates in the ranks and seamen before the mast.

Harvard College has sent into the field four hundred and thirty of her sons, more than seventeen per cent. of the whole number of her living alumni; Amherst, of her undergraduates and graduates of the last five years, has sent one hundred and fifty-nine, how many of earlier classes cannot now be ascertained; and Williams College, as nearly as can be learned, has given one hundred and eleven of her graduates and undergraduates to the army of the United States.

Thirty undergraduates of the Normal Schools are also in the service of the Union.

sons. A task is before them they cannot abandon, a destiny they cannot avert, a power no policy can dwarf, an achievement such as no history has ever written. Let narrow partisans contrive a Union from which New England is rejected, if they will ;-the Free Schools of New England will span the moat and scale the wall. And whenever in peace or war, in arts or arms, is sought the help of men in whose hearts courage is made strong by faith, whose thinking, scheming and fruitful brains are guides to untiring hands. instructed in every art of ingenious civilization,the graduates of your nurseries of learning will answer to the call, freer and stronger than the wind that floats your flag, in that mysterious power, of which Minerva, leaping full armed from the brain of Jove, is the type to the reason of philosophers, as well as to the dream of poets.

School of Agriculture and the Arts.-University System.

At the last session of Congress an Act was passed (chapter 130 of Acts of the 37th Congress, 1st session,) granting to each of the several States a portion of the public domain "to the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one College, where the leading object shall be, without excluding

other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts in such manner as the Legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." The apportionment to each State is "in quantity equal to 30,000 acres of land for each senator and representative in Congress to which the States are respectively entitled by the apportionment under the census of 1860."

The Act provides that the land, aforesaid, after being surveyed, shall be apportioned to the several States in sections or subdivisions of sections, not less than one quarter of a section; and whenever there are public lands in a State subject to sale at private entry at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, the quantity to which said State shall be entitled shall be selected from such lands within the limits of such State; and the Secretary of the Interior is directed to issue to each of the States in which there is not the quantity of public lands subject to sale at private entry at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, to which said State may be entitled under the provisions of the Act, land

scrip to the amount in acres for the deficiency of its distributive share; said scrip to be sold by said State and the proceeds thereof applied to the uses and purposes prescribed in the Act, and for no other uses and purposes whatsoever; and it further provides that in no case shall any State to which land scrip may be thus issued, be allowed to locate the same within the limits of any other State, or of any territory of the United States, but its assignees may locate said land scrip upon any of the unappropriated lands of the United States subject to sale at private entry at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre.

By the provisions of the Act, it is made incum

bent

upon every State which desires to avail itself of its benefits, to express its acceptance of the conditions prescribed, within two years from the date of its passage; that is, prior to July 2, 1864. And it is also required that any State which may claim and take the benefit of the provisions of the Act shall establish at least one College within five years, "where the leading object shall be to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." But "no portion of said fund, nor the interest thereon, shall be applied, directly or indirectly, under any pretence whatever, to