We happen to have on this subject one most striking and significant record. In 1670, the English Commissioners for Foreign Plantations addressed to the Governors of the several colonies a series of questions concerning the condition of the settlements under their charge. One of these questions related to the means of popular education. The answers of two of the Governors are preserved. One of them, the Governor of Connecticut, ruled a territory to which nature had not been specially propitious. Its climate was bleak, its coast rockbound, its soil blest with only ordinary fertility. The other territory, Virginia, had an extraordinary amount of natural advantages. It had fine harbors, numerous navigable streams, a climate more temperate by several degrees than its rival, the soil in its lowlands and valleys unsurpassed in any of the Plantations for its capacity to produce wheat, corn, and tobacco, its mountains filled with untold treasures of lime, iron, and coal, (and, it now seems, with petroleum also,) and withal that wonderful variety of natural resources, which seems best suited to stimulate and reward the productive industry of its inhabitants. The Governor of the less favored colony replied to the Royal Commissioners, as follows: "_One-fourth_ of the annual revenue of the Colony is laid out in maintaining free schools for the education of our children." The policy thus early impressed upon the colony has been maintained with steadfast and almost proverbial consistency to this day, that region being known the world over as the land of schoolmasters. The Governor of the other colony replied, "I thank God, there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years." To this policy she also has until lately only too faithfully adhered. Now what is the result? By referring to the tables accompanying the Census of 1860, we find the following significant facts. 1. The average cash value of land was not quite $12 an acre in one commonwealth (Virginia), and a little over $30 an acre in the other. 2. One commonwealth sustained only five inhabitants to every hundred acres of her soil, the other sustained eighteen inhabitants to every hundred acres. 3. The value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the population, was in one commonwealth $496 to every inhabitant, in the other $965 to every inhabitant. 4. The value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the acre, was in one commonwealth less than $26 to the acre, in the other more than $177 to the acre. To which facts I may add, what is true, though not in the Census, it was the invention of Eli Whitney, a travelling schoolmaster from Connecticut, that has trebled the value of land in nearly every Southern State.