But the
Commissioners are happy in considering the statute under which they
are assembled as proof that the Legislature is far from the
abandonment of objects so interesting. They are sensible that the
advantages of well-directed education, moral, political and
economical, are truly above all estimate. Education generates habits
of application, of order, and the love of virtue; and controls, by
the force of habit, any innate obliquities in our moral organization.
We should be far, too, from the discouraging persuasion that man is
fixed, by the law of his nature, at a given point; that his
improvement is a chimera, and the hope delusive of rendering
ourselves wiser, happier or better than our forefathers were. As
well might it be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto
yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield
better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the
savage stock, producing what is most estimable both in kind and
degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native
stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into
qualities of virtue and social worth. And it cannot be but that each
generation succeeding to the knowledge acquired by all those who
preceded it, adding to it their own acquisitions and discoveries, and
handing the mass down for successive and constant accumulation, must
advance the knowledge and well-being of mankind, not _infinitely_, as
some have said, but _indefinitely_, and to a term which no one can
fix and foresee.
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