particular study may be useful to the literature of a people, without
being appropriate to its social and political wants. If men were to
persist in teaching nothing but the literature of the dead languages in
a community where everyone is habitually led to make vehement exertions
to augment or to maintain his fortune, the result would be a very
polished, but a very dangerous, race of citizens. For as their social
and political condition would give them every day a sense of wants which
their education would never teach them to supply, they would perturb the
State, in the name of the Greeks and Romans, instead of enriching it by
their productive industry.

It is evident that in democratic communities the interest of
individuals, as well as the security of the commonwealth, demands that
the education of the greater number should be scientific, commercial,
and industrial, rather than literary. Greek and Latin should not be
taught in all schools; but it is important that those who by their
natural disposition or their fortune are destined to cultivate letters
or prepared to relish them, should find schools where a complete
knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired, and where the true
scholar may be formed. A few excellent universities would do more
towards the attainment of this object than a vast number of bad grammar
schools, where superfluous matters, badly learned, stand in the way of
sound instruction in necessary studies.

All who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations, ought
frequently to refresh themselves at the springs of ancient literature:
there is no more wholesome course for the mind. Not that I hold the
literary productions of the ancients to be irreproachable; but I
think that they have some especial merits, admirably calculated to
counterbalance our peculiar defects. They are a prop on the side on