The American readers of Mr. Spencer's "Social Statics" have raised their eyes in wholesome wonderment at the condemnation which is there found of all systems of national education. It is unfortunate that a writer who has given effective presentation to many truths should have failed to scrutinize his inductions by the light of certain ascertainable facts. The presumed requirements of a system caused him to prejudge what should have been investigated; and hence, upon the great theme of state education his rare illuminating powers shed a few side-lights of suggestion, and nothing more. The rough common sense of our humblest citizen disperses the philosopher's subtilties of logic with some such decisive sentence as that with which Dr. Johnson cut the meshes of the Fate-argument, or President Lincoln carried the pious defences of man-stealing. "We know we're free, and there's an end on 't." "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." If the state has no right to educate, it has no right to protect itself from the assaults of ignorance, and consequently no right to exist at all. This, to be sure, is dogmatism; but with loyal Americans to-day it comes so near being a moral instinct that it may be provisionally assumed and tested at leisure by the experience to which it has conducted us. In the crisis through which the nation has just passed, education as a state expediency has received its fullest vindication. The people whom the state educated up to an appreciation of the republican idea arose to be its saviours. No magnetism of personal leadership was given them. It was the instructed sense of the community which overcame the perils of faction and the incompetence of chiefs. And now, while we gratefully recognize those who at the critical moment fell or suffered or wrought for the Republic, let us not forget the unapplauded heroism which in time past laboriously accumulated the force lately revealed in many manly acts. The Trent Catechism declares that a final judgment is necessary, in order that the bad may be punished for the evil which in future time results from their mortal acts. If it may be held, conversely, that the conduct of the good is entitled to ever-increasing honor, we think it well that the biography of Horace Mann, educator and statesman, has been withheld to this day. It is nobly prophetic of the perfected faith in popular government and universal liberty which fills our hearts. It is in deep accordance with the psalm of victory which rises from loyal lips.