t

458 CONCLUSION.

moral qualities of high value ; and, having been acquired, it nur-tures tastes, and supplies sources of enjoyment, admirably adaptedto withdraw the mind from degrading and corrupting pleasures.Some distinguished scholars, no doubt, have been bad men ; butwe do not know how much worse they might have been, but fortheir love of learning, which, as far as it did operate upon theircharacters, could not have been otherwise than beneficial. Agenuine relish for intellectual enjoyments is naturally as inconsist-ent with a devotion to the coarser gratifications of sense, as thehabit of assiduous study is with that dissipation of time, of thought,and of faculty, which a life of vicious pleasure implies.*

It is not known to me, that the salutary tendency of educationand knowledge has ever been questioned in this country, fromany respectable quarter ; but it has lately been called in questionin England, under circumstances calculated to arrest attention.In a debate on prison discipline, in the House of Lords, on the20th of June, 1834, Lord Wharncliffe stated it as his opinion,“ that the moral effect of popular education had been unfavorablein every country ; and, in support of this opinion, he referred tothe report of the French Commissioners on the state of educationin the United States. He said, these Commissioners declaredit to be the result of their inquiry, that the more knowledge wasdiffused the more crime was increased. This they attributed tothe circumstance, that knowledge created wants among the hum-bler classes, which the perpetration of crime alone could gratify.Knowledge multiplied social relations ; it produced a desire forsocial enjoyments ; and the means of cultivating those relations,and indulging in those enjoyments, could not be honestly ob-tained by the lower classes in their present condition. Suchwas the opinion of the French Commissioners. He was verymuch afraid, he said, that those gentlemen were right, and that,the greater the diffusion of education in the country, the greaterwas the temptation to crime. He by no means doubted, that aproper discipline of the mind in youth was highly advantageous,but he very much doubted if the mere acquisition of knowledge,as such, was so. Of this he was certain, and he said it with re-

Library of Entertaining Knowledge, Vol. VIII. Part I. p. 1.