As to national dishonor, by comparison with what may be seen elsewhere, it is hardly possible for a patriot to feel a more bitter mortification than in reading the description, as recently given by M. Cousin, of the state of education in the Prussian dominions, and then looking over the hideous exhibition of ignorance and barbarism in this country; in representing to himself the vernal intelligence, (as we may rightly name it,) the information, the sense of decorum, the fitness for rational converse, which must quite inevitably diffuse a value and grace throughout the general youthful character under such a discipline, and then changing his view to what may be seen all over his own country--an incalculable and ever-increasing tribe of human creatures, growing up in a condition to show what a wretched and offensive thing is human nature left to itself. When neither opprobrium, nor prospective policy, nor sense of duty, can constrain the attention of the officially and virtually ruling part of society to an important national interest, it is sure to come on them at last in some more alarming and imperative manifestation. The present and very recent times have afforded significant indication of what an ignorant populace are capable of believing, and of being successfully instigated to perpetrate. It is not to be pretended that such ignorance, and such liabilities to mischief, exist only in particular spots of the land, as if the local outbreaks were merely incidental and insulated facts, standing out of community with anything widely pervading the mass. Within but very few years of the present date, we have had the spectacle of millions, literally millions, of the people of England, yielding an absolute credence to the most monstrous delusions respecting public questions and measures, imposed on them by dishonest artifice, and what may be called moral incendiarism; and these delusions of a nature to excite the passions of the multitude to crime. It is difficult to believe that all this can be seen without serious apprehension, by those who sustain the primary responsibility for devising measures to secure the national _safety_, (that we may take the lowest term of national welfare;) and that they can be content to rest that security on expedients which, in keeping the people in order, make them no wiser or better. It would truly be a glorious change in our history, if we might at length see the national power wielded by enlightened, virtuous, and energetic spirits, not only to the bare effect of withstanding disorder and danger, but in a resolute, invincible determination to redeem us from the national ignominy of exhibiting to the world, far in the nineteenth century, a rude, unprincipled, semi-barbarous populace.