may be, a kind providence is working in the right way for the land we love. As a people we specially needed two things. We needed the cutting off the temptation to seek political supremacy, in order that our common school, academic and collegiate training should be directed to practical ends.... The state of probation, pupilage, vassalage, or whatever it may be called in which we have been placed by the dominant party in Congress is we believe intended by the Giver of every good and perfect gift to give us higher and nobler ideas of education and the duties of educated men.... Again we needed to have manual labor made honorable. And here a kind Providence has brought good out of evil.... God is now honoring manual labor with us, as he has never done with any other nation. It is the high born, the cultivated, the intelligent, the brave, the generous, who are now constrained to work with their own hands. Labor is thus associated in our minds with all that is honorable in birth, refined in manners, bright in intellect, manly in character and magnanimous in soul.... Now that labor has been dignified and cherished we want it to be recognized in our schools and colleges.... The peasant who would confine the teachings of his son to Machiavelli’s Discourse ‘On the Prince’ or Fenelon’s ‘instruction to his royal pupils,’ would be no more ignoring his rank and station than are our teachers ignoring the condition of the country. Is the law of nations important to us who constitute nor state, nor colony, nor territory? Is the science of mind useful to us just now, when our highest duty is to mind our own business? Will logic help us in our reasoning whether we are in or out of the Union? Will the flowers of rhetoric plant any roses in our burnt districts?... We want on the contrary a comprehensive plan of instruction, which will embrace the useful rather than the profound, the practical rather than the theoretic; a system which will take up the ignorant in his degredation, enlighten his mind, cultivate his heart, and fit him for the solemn duties of an immortal being; a system which will come to the poor in his poverty and instruct him in the best method of procuring food, raiment and the necessaries of life; a system which will give happiness to the many, and not aggrandizement to the few, a system which will foster and develop mechanical ingenuity and relieve labor of its burden; which will entwine its laurel wreath around the brow of honest industry and frown with contempt upon the idle and worthless.”[201] Is it surprising that a man who thus exhorted the South in that day and hour should have been condemned by both Sumner of Massachusetts and Pollard of Virginia?