Closely connected with education, or such an education as we have now been considering, is _public morality_, and with it the strength and prosperity of a Nation. The condition of England in her various phases—civil, military, political, and religious—has naturally arrested the attention of intelligent foreigners, as presenting a marked superiority in these respects, or in some of them, to their own country. They have inquired the cause of this distinction with little success, and are as much at fault in being able to trace no symptoms of decay or flagging vitality in the system, cruelly tried as it not unfrequently is, prognosticating its ruin. Perhaps there is a solution of the enigma here. Perhaps the use of Scripture as the prime material of our early education has generated a better morality among us, and precluded the admission of certain forms of evil, little consonant to national greatness or national welfare, from which we see other countries, differently schooled, are not exempt. On this head, while avoiding undue pretension, we would not choose to say less than truth permits. With all the deductions to be allowed in disparagement of our claim to a high place in the scale of morals absolutely, we have yet, as compared with other countries,—a conscience, a sense namely of right and wrong, pervading the bulk of the people, and leavening the land with a wholesome morality,—we are not habituated to treat suicide as a virtue, {34}—our functionaries, as a body, are not venal,—we are not dangerous to the State when we meet in numbers beyond two or three,—and we are not incapable of self-government. M. de Montalembert, in his late work on the Future of England, while generously doing homage to the greatness of this country, the destinies of which he undertakes to decide, has not adverted to this high moral and religious training as supplying any explanation of the phenomenon: perhaps deeming his own country to be not less amply supplied with the means of religious culture. On this point we are at issue with him, if such is his opinion. In France, as in Catholic countries generally,—and it must be confessed in some Protestant countries too,—it is not so decidedly a religious or moral, as an ecclesiastical and conventual training, that is accorded; one, that is, which, while it overlays the memory with dogmas, and deals in technical and artificial requirements, leaves the conscience all but uninformed, and morality, as a pervading, practical, germinating principle, almost a non-entity. {35}