Suppose this fee ten dollars, and three
hundred dollars apportioned to a county on an average (more or less duly
proportioned), would there be thirty such paupers for every county? I
think not. The truth is, that the want of common education with us is
not from our poverty, but from want of an orderly system. More money is
now paid for the education of a part, than would be paid for that of the
whole, if systematically arranged. Six thousand common schools in New
York, fifty pupils in each, three hundred thousand in all; one
hundred and sixty thousand dollars annually paid to the masters; forty
established academies, with two thousand two hundred and eighteen
pupils; and five colleges, with seven hundred and eighteen students;
to which last classes of institutions seven hundred and twenty thousand
dollars have been given; and the whole appropriations for education
estimated at two and a half millions of dollars! What a pigmy to this is
Virginia become, with a population almost equal to that of New York!
And whence this difference? From the difference their rulers set on
the value of knowledge, and the prosperity it produces. But still, if a
pigmy, let her do what a pigmy may do. If among fifty children in each
of the six thousand schools of New York, there are only paupers enough
to employ twenty-five dollars of public money to each school, surely
among the ten children of each of our one thousand and two hundred
schools, the same sum of twenty-five dollars to each school will teach
its paupers (five times as much as to the same number in New York), and
will amount for the whole to thirty thousand dollars a year, the one
half only of our literary revenue.
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