from New England. But our figure implies, in the third place, that the giant which is now sleeping, will in due time, awake. The torpor which we see here, is not that of death. It is the rest rather of living powers, which may be expected to break forth hereafter, with a force proportional to the long restraint that has gone before. The secret strength and hidden resources of this great Commonwealth, as yet only beginning to come into view, may be expected before long to reveal themselves in another and altogether different way. The State will not only possess her present rich elements and vast capabilities of power, but these elements and capabilities will be understood and turned to account. Her greatness will be no longer a slumbering fact simply. The possible will be all actual. She will know and feel her proper strength, and she will be able so to use it, we may trust, that the whole nation may know and feel it also for its own good.

The undeveloped wealth of the State is at once both material and moral. It is only of late, as we all know, that the physical resources which it carries in its bosom, have begun to be properly understood and improved; and who shall say what treasures richer than the gold mines of California or Australia, are not still reserved in this form for its future use? But it is not too much to say, that the latent spiritual capabilities of the State are fairly parallel with this condition of her national resources, quite as full of promise, and of course much more entitled to our patriotic interest and regard. In comparing one country or region with another, intellectually, it is not enough to look simply at the difference of culture which may exist between them at a given time. Regard must be had also to the constitutional character of the mind itself, the quality of the moral soil, if we may use the expression, to which the culture is applied. A comparatively uneducated man may surpass in capacity and fitness, another who in point of actual education leaves him far behind; and just so it is possible that one people may be thrown into the shade for the time by another, though capable all the while in truth of a better order of cultivation, and carrying in itself thus both the possibility and the promise of a better spiritual future. In this view, we think it not absurd to magnify the mind of Pennsylvania, although it be fashionable in certain quarters, we know, to treat it with disparagement and contempt. We are persuaded, for our part, that the State has no reason to shrink here from a comparison with any other section of our flourishing and highly favored land. She may fall behind some parts of New England in the machinery of education, and she may have less to boast of just now, in the way of general knowledge among her people. Her schools and colleges are not equal to those of Massachusetts. She may not vie, in point of intellectual culture, with Connecticut. But it does not follow from this, by any means, that she is inferior to either of these States in the matter and quality of her intelligence itself; nor even that her particular culture, such as it is, and so far as it has yet gone, may not be intrinsically worth quite as much, to say the least, as that with which it is thus

unfavorably contrasted. That growth is not ordinarily the best, which is most rapid and easy, and which serves to bring into view with the greatest readiness all it has power to reveal. It is by slow processes rather, that what is most deep and solid, whether in the world of nature or in the world of mind, is ripened and unfolded finally into its proper perfection. There is room for encouragement in this thought, when we look at the acknowledged deficiencies and short-comings of our giant State, with regard to education. She has proceeded with slow and heavy course thus far, in the development both of her spiritual and physical resources. In the case of the first, however, as well as of the last, it is possible that there may have been an advantage in this delay. Time, and a certain progress in the general life of the country, may have been needed to make room for the development under its most promising form. An earlier, more active cultivation, might have proved possibly more artificial, and therefore less vigorous and free, as being the result of foreign outward influences, rather than the true product of our proper provincial life itself. This would have been a lasting and irremediable calamity. It was far better, we may believe, that the peculiar constituents of our life, the elements from which was to be formed in the end the common character of the State, should not be forced into premature activity, but be left rather to work like the hidden powers of nature for a time, without noise or show, in the way of silent necessary preparation for their ultimate destiny and use. In such view, they are like the mineral wealth that lies buried so largely beneath our soil, whose value is created to no small extent by wants and opportunities which time only could bring to pass. All that is wanted now to make them a source of intellectual and moral greatness is, that thay should be subjected to educational processes answerable to their own nature, and wrought into such form of general culture as this may be found to require. And may we not say, that the hour of Providence has at length struck for the accomplishment of this great work? With the mighty strides the State of Pennsylvania is now making, in outward wealth and prosperity, is it too much to cherish the pleasing belief that she is fully prepared also for a corresponding development of the rich energies that have thus far slumbered to a great extent in her moral and spiritual life; and that intellectually, as well as materially, from this time onward, her course is destined to be like that of the rising sun, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day?

What has now been said of the general intellectual character and condition of the State, may be referred with special application to the German element, which has entered so largely from the first into the composition of its life.

For years, as is well known, this element has weighed like a heavy incubus among us on the cause of education, both in its lower and higher forms. The fact has often been noticed and quoted, as a reproach upon the German mind itself. Rightly considered, however, it carries with it no fair room for any such re

proach. So far as Pennsylvania may seem to have suffered, in this way, from the prevailing German character of her population, the evil has resulted, properly speaking, not from the constitution at all of the German mind, as such, but from the circumstances only of peculiar disadvantage in which this mind has stood here from the beginning. It was doomed in the nature of the case, we may say, to remain rude and inactive for a long series of years, with little or no participation in the onward movement of thought around it. A very large proportion of the original emigration from Germany to this State, consisted of persons who were comparatively poor, and who found it necessary, therefore, to devote their attention, almost exclusively, to occupations and cares immediately connected with their own personal subsistence. Their language, at the same time, formed a barrier to their free communication, with the English community, in the midst of which they dwelt. At the present time, and no such barrier can long stand. The relations of business, politics and trade, will soon sweep it out of the way. But in the earlier period, to which the case before us belongs, it was of far more serious account. It gave rise to separate German settlements, which produced a permanent isolation of interest and life, by transmitting the German tongue from one generation to another, and thus shutting out those who used it from the reigning social system of the country. No situation could well be more unfavorable for intellectual activity and improvement. There was no room in truth for action or progress in any such form; and so the energies of this part of our population became devoted almost entirely to agricultural pursuits, and to the service of purely material interests, with little or no regard to the social culture of their English neighbors. The result was, with their habits of industry and economy, that they soon rose above their first condition of want, and gained property more and more; till at length, as is well known, a large proportion of the wealth of the State is found in the hands of their descendants. But this outward favorable change brought with it. no corresponding moral enlargement; it had no power of course, in the circumstances, to do anything of this sort. It served to produce rather an undue attachment to money for its own sake; and along with this, as a necessary consequence, a low appreciation of all that pertains to the proper care and culture of the mind. Thus the German mind of Pennsylvania has become, with many, in a way most false and treasonable, certainly, to the true, original constitution of the German mind itself, the proverbial type of narrowminded ignorance and close-fisted avarice combined. No part of the community has needed education more; and yet, from no quarter, unfortunately, has the cause of education, in time past, been so much discouraged and withstood.

The evil, too, has had a tendency to fatten itself upon its own bad fruit. The want of knowledge can never fail to make itself felt as a want also of power, and to carry along with it, for this reason, a more or less uncomfortable sense of weakness and inferiority. In this way, the relation of the German to the predominant education

around him, has been too generally of a sort to create in his mind a prejudice against it, as involving in some way an unfavorable distinction at his expense. Then the bad purposes which such education has been found palpably to serve in many cases, have come in as a plausible show of reason to clothe their prejudice with still greater force. An intimate association was unhappily established in his mind thus between learning and mischief, very much akin with the union of smartness and fraud that goes to make up the character of a pettyfogging lawyer. Scholar and Yankee, grew to be terms of nearly the same sense. The prejudice has operated seriously against all education; but especially, of course, against education in its higher forms. Whatever might be thought of common schools, prudently held within proper bounds, all seminaries of a more advanced character, were to be frowned upon and discouraged as productive of evil rather than of good. Colleges, in particular, have been brought in this way, extensively, into the very worst odor. In the eyes of the German farmer, they have appeared, very generally, to be nurseries of idleness, extravagance and pride, or schools of fair-faced knavery and over-reaching art and wit, something worse in truth than an unprofitable vanity, an actual burden upon society, rather than a source of blessing and strength.

It is not easy to express the disastrous bearing of this widespread indifference and prejudice, in various ways, on the cause of education thus far in Pennsylvania. The evil has not limited itself to the German portion of our citizenship as such. This has been too large and powerful to be a simply negative factor in the life of the State. It has lent a vast positive force to the forination of its character. We are emphatically a German State. The whole spirit and conduct of the State in regard to education, as well as in other directions, have been influenced and determined to no considerable extent by the German habit of thought. All our educational movements accordingly, have been heavy and slow. Especially have our colleges been left to contend with all sorts of discouragement and difficulty. A number of such institutions have been established; but none of them can be said to rest on any proper foundation, or be possessed of much real strength. The State has indeed made them, to some extent, the object of her patronizing care; but it has been in such a way, for the most part, as to defeat, in a great measure, the purposes of her own liberality. Her patronage has been administered, with variable, unsettled, fitful policy; or one might say, perhaps, capriciously, with no policy at all. The colleges have been left, generally, to take care of themselves. In these circumstances, the number has become twice as great as the actual wants of the State require; while the resources of the whole of them thrown together, would not be sufficient to make one institution fairly equal to what is required by its honor. In the midst of such public neglect, itself the fruit and sign of the prevailing popular sentiment in regard to the interest concerned, but little was to be expected for the support of such seminaries of

learning, in the way of private munificence. In the history of the colleges of Pennsylvania, we hear of no rich donations or legacies, to erect buildings, found libraries, or endow professorships, lasting and noble monuments of a truly large zeal for the cause of letters. The only thing which may look like an exception, perhaps, to the remark, is presented to us in the magnificent Orphan College of Stephen Girard; but this most wasteful charity is no monument, properly speaking, of any really liberal interest in favor of letters, just as little as it can lay claim to the character of any such interest in favor of religion; it is but the glaring expression rather of a narrow and illiberal mind, with regard to both. Thus it is, that our colleges have been left to build themselves up as they best could, without any such endowment as was needed to make them properly strong and independent over against the low and false views of education with which they have been surrounded. They have been doomed, in consequence to a sickly existence, the unfavorable influence of which, has extended itself to the universal cause of knowledge in the State. For common schools will never flourish, where no suitable provision is made for education in its higher character; and it must be visionary, of course, to expect in such a case, that any general intelligence or cultivation, can be brought to have place, by any means, in the community at large.

Altogether, it is evident enough, that the German element in our midst has had much to do with the somewhat proverbial sluggishness of our State, thus far, in the march of intellectual improvement; and much reproach has been cast, in certain quarters, upon the Pennsylvania Dutch, as they are vulgarly called, for this very reason, as being a sort of Boetian drawback and drag on the whole life of the State, greatly to its disparagement, especially as compared with its more smart and forward neighbors of the East and North. But what we have said of our moral composition, as a whole, is particularly true, we believe, of just that part of it which is subjected to this reproach. If the German mind of Pennsylvania has stood in the way of letters, heretofore, and caused her to lag behind other States, in the policy of education, we may see in it, at the same time, the fair promise and pledge of a more auspicious future, that shall serve hereafter, to redeem her character, on this score, from all past and present blame. So far as this large mass of mind is concerned, it is owing, certainly, to no constitutional inferiority, that it has not yielded more fruit in the way of knowledge and culture. The fact, as we have have just seen, is sufficiently explained by other causes. Regarded as material, simply, no body of mind in the country, is more susceptible of education, or more favorably disposed for the reception of it, in its most healthy and vigorous form. Who that knows anything of the literature and science of Germany itself, will bear to be told that there is no native affinity between the spirit of such a people and the cause of knowledge, or that it can require anything more than proper opportunity and encouragement, in any circumstances, to bring this affinity finally into view? It is a slander upon the