"It will scarcely be doubted that the impulse which society has received, particularly since the commencement of the passing century, and which has evidently been connected with the growth of freedom in this country, has been attended with many of these excesses, and not the least probably in the department of education. Numerous adventurers have set forth upon this field, with different pretensions indeed, and unequal advantages, but all large in their expectations, and confident of success. They have seemed to themselves almost to realize the ideal good, to annihilate the space between barbarism and refinement, to find in relation to intellectual attainment what experimental philosophy had sought in vain, the mysterious agent which should transmute the baser metals into gold. "Without denying at all the actual advance of learning, or disparaging the improvements which are taking place in the arrangements and administration both of public and private seminaries, we cannot be so fond (_absit invidia verbo_) as to accredit all the inventions of this restless age. We cannot suppose that paths so various, which have been struck out in the heat of competition, and systems based on principles and conducted by methods so frequently differing from each other, will all conduce to the purposes for which they are intended, except as they may excite more general attention to the interests of education, and furnish materials of which wisdom and experience shall at length avail themselves, to perfect truer and more practicable systems, suited to the intellectual and moral nature of man, and to the various relations and interests of life. In this view, it is evident that the conduct of public literary institutions, at the present time, is attended with no trivial embarrassments. That expansion of the public mind and progress of society, which necessarily take place in a country favored with advantages of elementary instruction and general information, will always be creating just demands upon the higher seats of learning, which will task all their energies, and bring into requisition all their resources. The mass of the community, becoming more enlightened, will call for proportionally higher qualifications in those who are sent out to preside over the public interests, and their progress in influence will produce a yet more powerful reaction. But to meet these demands amidst the conflicting sectional interests and fluctuations of public feeling, which are usually attendant upon a state of freedom, to discriminate rightly between the diverse systems of instruction and discipline, which are set forth with such frequency and such earnestness of commendation; to keep so near the public sentiment as not to lose the confidence of the community, and yet not to follow it so implicitly as to sacrifice the more desirable good of self-approbation; this is a labor which can be estimated by those only who have had the trial of sustaining it.