Nor was it within the writer's design to suggest any particular plans,
regulations, or instrumental expedients, in promotion of the system of
operations hopefully begun, for raising these classes from their
degradation. His part has been to make such a prominent representation of
the calamitous effects of their ignorance, as shall prove it an aggravated
national guilt to allow another generation to grow up to the same
condition as the present and the past. In the course of attempting this,
occasions have been seized of exposing the absurdity of those who are
hostile to the mental improvement of the people. If any one should say
that this is a mere beating of the air, for that all such hostility is now
gone by, he may be assured there are many persons, of no insignificant
rank in society, who would from their own consciousness smile at the
simplicity with which he can so easily shape men's opinions and
dispositions to his mind whether they will or not. He must have been the
most charitable or the most obtuse of observers.

It is feared the readers of the following essay will find some defect of
distribution and arrangement. To the candor of those who are practised in
literary work it would be an admissible plea, that when, in a preparation
to meet a particular occasion for which but little time has been allowed,
a series of topics and observations has been hastily sketched out, it is
far from easy to throw them afterwards into a different order. The author
has to bespeak indulgence also, here and there, to something too like
repetition. If he qualifies the terms in which this fault is acknowledged,
it is because he thinks that, though there be a recurrence of
similarities, a mere bare iteration is avoided, by means of a diversity
and addition of the matter of illustration and enforcement.

Any benevolent writer on the subject would wish he could treat it without
such frequent use of the phrases, "lower orders," "subordinate classes,"