Would it not have a good effect for the friends of the University to take the lead in proposing and effecting a practical scheme of elementary schools? to assume the character of the friends, rather than the opponents of that object?  The present plan has appropriated to the primary schools forty-five thousand dollars for three years, making one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars.  I should be glad to know if this sum has educated one hundred and thirty-five poor children?  I doubt it much.  And if it has, they have cost us one thousand dollars a piece for what might have been done with thirty dollars.  Supposing the literary revenue to be sixty thousand dollars, I think it demonstrable, that this sum, equally divided between the two objects, would amply suffice for both.  One hundred counties, divided into about twelve wards each, on an average, and a school in each ward of perhaps ten children, would be one thousand and two hundred schools, distributed proportionably over the surface of the State.  The inhabitants of each ward, meeting together (as when they work on the roads), building good log-houses for their school and teacher, and contributing for his provisions, rations of pork, beef, and corn, in the proportion, each of his other taxes, would thus lodge and feed him without feeling it; and those of them who are able, paying for the tuition of their own children, would leave no call on the public fund but for the tuition fee of, here and there, an accidental pauper, who would still be fed and lodged with his parents.  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.