already in many matters, has tried to assert itself in the question of Education. It has been maintained that there should be no attention on the part of the State to the education of the citizens, but that, in the matter of learning to read and write and of all farther learning or mental training, the individuals horn into a community should be left to their hereditary chances, the discretion or kindness of those about them, and their own power of gradually finding out what they need, and buying it or begging it. Now with this direction of modern speculation the intentions of Roger Williams had nothing to do. He was a democrat in politics, and, as such, he might have gone on to new definitions of what, in secular matters, should be left to the individual, and what should be still regulated by the majority; but what these definitions would have been must be left to inference from the records of his farther political life in Rhode Island. Respecting Schools and Universities he did, indeed, hold that they were not to be regarded as the nurseries of a clergy, the appendages of a Church, or the depositaries and supports of any religious creed. "For any depending of the Church of Christ on such schools," he wrote, "I find not a tittle in the Testament of Christ Jesus." He would certainly, therefore, have been for no expenditure of public money on the _religious_ education of the young, and he would have been for the extraction of all theological teaching out of existing schools and universities. But he "honoured schools," he says," for tongues and arts," and I have found no trace in him of a notion that State support of schools and universities for such secular learning is illegitimate. His _Voluntaryism_, so far as it was declared, or, I believe, intended, was wholly Voluntaryism in the matter of Church and Religion. In that sphere, however, his Voluntaryism was absolute, and went as far as anything calling itself Voluntaryism that has since been heard of in the English- speaking world.