Sir, it is one of the noblest attributes of man that he can derive knowledge from his predecessors. We possess the accumulated learning of ages. From ten thousand confluent streams, the river of truth, widened and deepened, has come down to us; and it is among our choicest delights, that if we can add to its volume, as it rolls on, it will bear a richer freight of blessings to our successors. But it is here proposed to annul this beneficent law of nature; to repel this proffered bounty of Heaven. It is proposed to create a race of men, to whom all the lights of experience shall be extinguished; whose hundredth generation shall be as ignorant and as barbarous as its first. Sir, I hold all voluntary ignorance to be a crime; I hold all enforced ignorance to be a greater crime. Knowledge is essential to all rational enjoyment; it is essential to the full and adequate performance of every duty. Whoever intercepts knowledge, therefore, on its passage to a human soul; whoever strikes down the hand that is outstretched to grasp it, is guilty of one of the most heinous of offences. Add to your virtue knowledge, says the apostle; but here the command is, Be-cloud and be-little by ignorance whatever virtue you may possess. Sir, let me justify the earnestness of these expressions by describing the transition of feeling through which I have lately passed. I come from a community where knowledge ranks next to virtue in the classification of blessings. On the tenth day of April last, the day before I left home for this place, I attended the dedication of a schoolhouse in Boston which had cost $70,000. The mayor presided, and much of the intelligence and worth of the city was present on the occasion. I see by a paper which I have this day received, that another schoolhouse, in the same city, was dedicated on Monday of the present week. It was there stated by the mayor that the cost of the city schoolhouses which had been completed within the last three months was $200,000. On Tuesday of this week, a new high schoolhouse in the city of Cambridge was dedicated. Mr. Everett, the president of Harvard College, was present, and addressed the assembly in a long, and, I need not add, a most beautiful speech. That schoolhouse, with two others to be dedicated within a week, will have cost $25,000. Last week, in the neighboring city of Charlestown, a new high schoolhouse, of a most splendid and costly character, was dedicated by the mayor and city government, by clergy and laity. But it is not mayors of cities and presidents of colleges alone that engage in the work of consecrating temples of education to the service of the young. Since I have been here, the governor of the commonwealth, Mr. Briggs, went to Newburyport, a distance of forty miles, to attend the dedication of a schoolhouse which cost $25,000. On a late occasion, when the same excellent chief magistrate travelled forty miles to attend the