If we must have a metaphor, the common school, we may say, is the digging for the foundation, but not the foundation itself. It is the gathering of some of the materials, but is neither the main, nor the supporting part, of the great structure of national education. We have no wish to underrate its importance--its very great importance--and for this very reason do we attempt to expose those fallacies which, in aiming at the depreciation of the higher, would infallibly injure the lower and dependent interest. The best argument is simply an appeal to facts. All this inane declamation flies at once before it. In what States of our Union are common schools most flourishing? Precisely those, we answer, in which the best support is given to the higher institutions of learning. Who will venture to charge the Pilgrim Fathers with anti-popular tendencies? and yet, in laying the foundation of a system of national education, they began with the college. The leading institution of the kind was founded before the birth of one generation, and only eighteen years after they first broke the silence of the wilderness. How much of that leaven of a _sound mind_ which has characterized New England may be traced to this one source? Again--let any thoughtful man look over the face of our own State of New York. Millions and millions have been given for the cause of popular education; and this is as it should be, as far as money is concerned. But will such means alone secure the desired result? No man at all acquainted with the facts can fail to see, that just in proportion as there is to be found in any town or locality in our State that higher intelligence which is the offspring of the higher institutions of learning, there the common school has ever had its best support, its best teachers, its most sound, and elevated, and healthful system of instruction. From thence, too, have been sent forth in return the best candidates for our colleges, or, to get up our metaphor again, the best supplies for those distributing reservoirs, of whose light and heat they had so liberally partaken. Wherever, on the other hand, there has been no such leaven of a higher intelligence, the funds so lavishly bestowed have left the common mind very much as they found it. The stream has failed to rise above its fountain. Light has failed to act contrary to its own law, in ascending out of darkness; and if there has been any "_heat_," it has only been the fermentation of ignorance, or of crude smatterings of knowledge, more mischievous, perhaps, than ignorance itself. Any process, or public provision, by which our best colleges (and by such we mean those which have the least lowered their own standard in obedience to popular clamor) should be enabled to plant each year one of its most intelligent graduates in every county in the State, would do more to promote common school education than all the money that has been thrown broadcast over the land for the past quarter of a century.