Another common opinion on this subject is that private enterprise is adequate to meet the want. Private enterprise in education is not indeed to be discarded. Where the community as a whole, in its organized capacity, will do nothing, let individuals do what they can. In such cases, let those who appreciate the advantages of education, concert measures for the establishment of schools and the employment of teachers, and for inducing parents who are indifferent to send their children. By these private efforts, the community may be gradually awakened to the importance of the subject, and so be induced to take it up on their own account. But private benevolence is not sufficient for so great a work. Private benevolence besides is apt to be fitful. It is at best subject to interruption by death and by reverses of fortune, while the cause is one which especially demands steadiness and continuity. The means for educating a community or a city should no more be subject to interruption, than the means of lighting it, or of supplying it with water. The argument for depending upon private enterprise for devising and providing the means for popular education, would apply equally well to matters of police, and to the protection of property. The strong-armed and the sagacious can take care of themselves. The stout-hearted and the good, by due concert and combination, could keep criminals in some check, even in a country where there were no courts of justice, or prisons, or detective police. But this is not the ordinary or the best mode of accomplishing the end, nor could it in any case be thoroughly efficient. The restraint and punishment of crime belong to society as a whole, in its sovereign capacity. To the same society belongs the duty of seeing that its members do not fall into degrading ignorance and vice. God, in ordaining human society, had something higher in view than merely providing for the punishment of crime. Our Heavenly Father would have his children raised to the full enjoyment of their privileges as social and rational beings, and he seems to have established society for this very end, among others, that there may be an agency and a machinery adequate and fitted to drag even the unwilling out of the mire into which they have fallen. Without such an interposition on the part of society as a whole, the work will not be done. The mass of the people will remain in ignorance in every community, in which the community as such does not provide the means of education and general enlightenment.