A DISCOURSE, &c.

APPOINTED to deliver the annual discourse of the American Philosophical Society, I propose to sketch the philosophical condition of this country, and explain the influence of America on the mind. The task is not an easy one, owing to the extreme dispersion of the materials. Elsewhere intellectual improvements are collected in the accessible repositories of a metropolis, absorbing most of the intelligence of a whole nation, and flourishing with artificial culture long applied. In the United States we have no such emporium; the arts and sciences are but of recent and spontaneous growth, scattered over extensive regions and a sparse population.

We will begin with the base of the American pile, whose aggrandisement, like the pyramids of Africa, confounds the speculations of Europe. While the summit and sides elsewhere are more wrought and finished, America excels in the foundation, in which we are at least the seniors, of all other nations. Public funds for the

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the education of the whole community are endowments exclusively American, which have been in operation here for several ages, while the most improved governments of Europe are but essaying such a groundwork, which indeed some of them dread, and others dare not risk. It is nearly two hundred years since school funds were established by that aboriginal and immortal hive of intelligence, piety, and self-government, the Plymouth colony. These inestimable appropriations are now incorporated with all our fundamental institutions. By the Constitution of the United States it is the duty of government to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Not one of the eleven new States has been admitted into the Union without provision in its constitution for schools, academies, colleges, and universities. In most of the original States large sums in money are appropriated to education, and they claim a share in the great landed investments which are mortgaged to it in the new States. Reckoning all those contributions federal and local, it may be asserted that nearly as much as the whole national expenditure of the United States is set apart by laws to enlighten the people. The public patronage of learning in this country, adverting to what the value of these donations will be before the close of the present century, equals at least the ostentatious bounties conferred on it in Europe. In one State alone, with but 275,000 inhabitants, more than forty thousand pupils are instructed at

the public schools. I believe we may compute the number of such pupils throughout the United States at more than half a million. In the city of Philadelphia, without counting the private or the charity schools, there are about five thousand pupils in the Commonwealth's seminaries, taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, at an expense to the public of little more than three dollars a year each one. Nearly the whole minor population of the United States are receiving school education. Besides the multitudes at school, there are considerably more than three thousand under graduates always matriculated at the various colleges and universities, authorised to grant academical degrees; not less than twelve hundred at the medical schools; several hundred at the theological seminaries; and at least a thousand students of law. Nearly all of these are under the tuition of professors, without sinecure support, depending for their livelihood on capacity and success in the science of instruction. In no part of these extensive realms of knowledge is there any monastic prepossession against the modern improvements. Not long since chemistry, political economy, and the other great improvements of the age were excluded from the English universities as innovations unfit to be classed with rhetoric, logic, and scholastic ethics. Oxford and Cambridge, in the fine metaphor of Dugald Stewart, are immovably moored to the same station by the strength of their cables, thereby enabling the historian of the human mind to measure

the rapidity of the current by which the rest of the world are borne along. The schools are equally stationary. Notwithstanding their barbarous discipline, and the barbarous privileges of the colleges, they have always produced good Latinists and Hellenists. But American education is better adapted to enlarge and strengthen the mind, and prepare it for practical usefulness. In that excellent institution, the Military Academy, the dead languages are not taught, and that kind of scholarship is postponed to sciences certainly more appropriate to a military education. This is not the occasion to inquire whether those standard exercises of the faculties and roots of language may ever be supplanted without injury. But as it is certain that the many great men who have received education at the English seminaries is not a conclusive proof of their excellence, though often cited for the purpose, so it is also true, that eminent individuals have appeared in literature and science, without the help of that kind of scholarship. The founder of the American Philosophical Society was not a scholar in this sense; yet his vigorous and fruitful mind, teeming with sagacity, and cultivated by observation, germinated many of the great discoveries, which, since matured by others, have become the monuments of the age: And whether science, politics, or polite literature, was the subject of which Franklin treated, he always wrote in a fine, pure style, with the power and the charm of genius.

Successive improvements in the modern lan