Secular Schools Commended

Goldwin Smith is an intelligent and unbiased Englishman, who spent two or three years in this country looking into our educational system, and taking a hand in it himself at Cornell University. He spoke lately in London in favor of a compulsory education bill, and referring as follows to the American system of common schools : What branch of education in a comnion schcol had a tendency to corrupt a child's moral senseV Secular schools, if well conducted, on the contrary exorcised high moral influence. He had seen the working of common schools in a great nation. Ho was not a blind worshiper of American institutions. He saw faults in the American charactor and faulis in the American sy6tem ; but he told them that the influence of the common schools iu that country was good, - moral as well as intellectual. He told them that if thcre were bad things and bad men in America the influence of those schools was good, and that they tendered in the maiu to produce, not clever deviis, bixt a law-loving and God-fearing population. If the morality and intelligenco of the American nation wero promoted by their common school system, so was their wealth. Remember, great as liad been our prosperity of late years, it depended upon the superior skill of our artisans. Remember that other countries were acquiring that skill rapidly, and that we with all our wealth might bo distanced in the race unloss we educated our people, unless we would give them that general intelligence which would enable them to take in a technical education. Depend upon it, we attribute a great deal too much to formal enacttnents of religión and morality. Take away the formal teaching of religión, and the roligious influence und the moral influence of society would still reinain. He was Oiut mA l, l'.j L, ' 'Oxford they had all the apparatus of theology. At Coruell they had a Secular system, and it was pointed at by its enemies as a godless system. Though he loved Oxford as well as any of her sons, let him say that he fully believed Cornell was just as religious as Oxford.