is hardly possible for a patriot to feel a more bitter mortification than
in reading the description, as recently given by M. Cousin, of the state
of education in the Prussian dominions, and then looking over the hideous
exhibition of ignorance and barbarism in this country; in representing to
himself the vernal intelligence, (as we may rightly name it,) the
information, the sense of decorum, the fitness for rational converse,
which must quite inevitably diffuse a value and grace throughout the
general youthful character under such a discipline, and then changing his
view to what may be seen all over his own country--an incalculable and
ever-increasing tribe of human creatures, growing up in a condition to
show what a wretched and offensive thing is human nature left to itself.

When neither opprobrium, nor prospective policy, nor sense of duty, can
constrain the attention of the officially and virtually ruling part of
society to an important national interest, it is sure to come on them at
last in some more alarming and imperative manifestation. The present and
very recent times have afforded significant indication of what an ignorant
populace are capable of believing, and of being successfully instigated to
perpetrate. It is not to be pretended that such ignorance, and such
liabilities to mischief, exist only in particular spots of the land, as if
the local outbreaks were merely incidental and insulated facts, standing
out of community with anything widely pervading the mass. Within but very
few years of the present date, we have had the spectacle of millions,
literally millions, of the people of England, yielding an absolute
credence to the most monstrous delusions respecting public questions and
measures, imposed on them by dishonest artifice, and what may be called
moral incendiarism; and these delusions of a nature to excite the passions
of the multitude to crime. It is difficult to believe that all this can be
seen without serious apprehension, by those who sustain the primary
responsibility for devising measures to secure the national _safety_,