The fact is, individuals and the community are so bound together, that on many points their obligations lie in coincident lines. The matter of education is one of these points. God has ordained the parental relation, and has implanted the parental affections, for this very reason, among others, that the faculties of the helpless young immortal may have due training and development,--that this development may not be left to chance, like that of a worthless weed, but may have the protection and guardianship which are the necessary birthright of every rational creature brought into being by the voluntary act of another. But God has ordained society also for this same end, among others, namely, that his rational creatures may have a competent agency, bound by the laws and necessities of its own welfare to make adequate provision for the instruction and education of every human being. The one duty does not conflict with the other. The one obligation does not impair the other. Both lie in coincident lines. But, as a question of fact, is it true that common schools impair the sense of obligation in the minds of parents in regard to the duty of educating their children? I affirm the fact to be exactly the contrary. Those communities in which there are no common schools, and in which the people generally are in a state of deplorable ignorance, are precisely those in which the sense of parental obligation on this point is at the lowest ebb. Go to a region of country in which not one man in ten can read and write, and you will find that not one man in ten will care whether his children are taught to read and write. Those communities on the contrary which have the best and most complete system of common schools, and in which this system has prevailed longest and has taken most complete hold of the public mind, are the very ones in which individuals will be found most keenly alive to the importance of the subject, and in which a parent will be regarded as a monster, if his children are allowed to grow up uneducated.