Ranging, out of the schools, through the general walks of society, we find among our poorer classes, and not seldom in the middling, an ignorance equally deplorable and mortifying. Judging by the number met with in _business_ transactions, who cannot write their names or read, and considering how many there are whose poverty or sex debars them from such transactions, and lessens their chances of scholarship; we should scarcely exceed the truth, in estimating the _white adults of Virginia who cannot read or write, at twenty or thirty thousand_. {20} And of many who can read, how contracted the range of intellect! The mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, all unexplored, though presented hourly to the eye; the glorious heavens, their grandeur, their distances, and the laws of their motion, unthought of; man himself--his structure, so fearful and so wonderful--those traits in his bodily and mental frame, attention to which would the most essentially conduce to bodily and mental health--all unnoted; History, Geography, _tabulæ rasæ_ to them! And for political knowledge, upon which we of Virginia mainly pride ourselves--choose, at random, a man from the throng in any court-house yard, and question him touching the division of power between our two governments, and its distribution among the departments of each: the probabilities are ten to one, that he will not solve one in ten of your questions--even of those which are to be answered from the mere faces of the two constitutions. Take him then into that wild, where _construction_ has been wont to expatiate, and you will find him just able to declare _for_ or _against_ this or that controverted power or measure: not because his reason has discerned it to be constitutional or otherwise, but because it is approved or disapproved by a chief of his own party, or by the leader of a hostile one. And the aggregate of opinions thus caught by accident, is the basis of the _popular will_: and it is the voice prompted by this will, that is called "_The voice of God!_" Do not misapprehend me. Never would I have the voice of the people other than "the voice of God"--other than all-powerful--within its appropriate sphere. I am as loyal to their sovereignty as the most devout of their flatterers can be: and it is from my desire to see it perpetuated, that I speak out these unpalatable truths. Some roughness of handling is often necessary to heal a wound. The people, like other sovereigns, are sometimes misled by flattery: they should imitate also the wisdom of those monarchs we occasionally meet with in history, who can hear unwelcome truths, and let the speaker live; nay, hearken kindly to his discourse, and let it weigh upon their future conduct. Do I overrate the portion of the people I now address, in classing them with such monarchs?