NATIONAL AID FOR NATIONAL EDUCATION. The title is its own argument. It is the instinct of self-preservation. If one member suffer, the whole body suffers. Congress has adjourned without passing the proposed law. It was to appropriate $10,000,000 annually for five years, and to distribute the same among the States and Territories in the proportion of illiteracy. There is no doubt that some such bill will yet be passed. At this ratio, the former slave States would receive seven and a half millions out of the ten. That the North heartily agrees to this has been a grateful surprise to the South. The scheme would not have been thought of, except for the need of it in that section. The question may, then, be raised: What would be the relation of such aid to the work of this Association? It would greatly increase the demand for the training of common school teachers in our normal schools and colleges. The three months of country schools would be raised to six. The increased facilities would tend to lead the people to call for a better quality of teachers. Dr. Barnas Sears, the late Secretary of the Peabody Fund, learned that one competent teacher introduced, led to the displacement of a half-dozen incompetents. The training of the teachers is the wholesale business in the process of education. Then, it is of the utmost importance that these teachers of the millions should themselves have that moral and religious preparation which our missionary institutions seek to impart, so that the lessons of morality, and virtue and piety shall be taught, along with the elements of a common education. The House committee, in their report, state that, according to the census of 1880, 4,715,395 persons at the South over ten years of age, or 70.56 per cent., are not able to write. To raise up the qualified teachers for this illiterate mass will tax the resources of all the institutions founded in that region by the benevolence of the North.