I am well aware that all these constitutional enactments are not likely to obtain much credit in England.  It is not only that grand phrases fail to convince us, but that they carry to our senses almost an assurance of their own inefficiency.  When we hear that a people have declared their intention of being henceforward better than their neighbors, and going upon a new theory that shall lead them direct to a terrestrial paradise, we button up our pockets and lock up our spoons.  And that is what we have done very much as regards the Americans.  We have walked with them and talked with them, and bought with them and sold with them; but we have mistrusted them as to their internal habits and modes of life, thinking that their philanthropy was pretentious and that their theories were vague.  Many cities in the States are but skeletons of towns, the streets being there, and the houses numbered—­but not one house built out of ten that have been so counted up.  We have regarded their institutions as we regard those cities, and have been specially willing so to consider them because of the fine language in which they have been paraded before us.  They have been regarded as the skeletons of philanthropical systems, to which blood and flesh and muscle, and even skin, are wanting.  But it is at least but fair to inquire how far the promise made has been carried out.  The elaborate wordings of the constitutions made by the French politicians in the days of their great revolution have always been to us no more than so many written grimaces; but we should not have continued so to regard them had the political liberty which they promised followed upon the promises so magniloquently made.  As regards education in the States—­at any rate in the Northern and Western States—­I think that the assurances put forth in the various written constitutions have been kept.  If this be so, an American citizen, let him be ever so arrogant, ever so impudent if you will, is at any rate a civilized being, and on the road to that cultivation which will sooner or later divest him of his arrogance.  Emollit mores.  We quote here our old friend the colonel again.  If a gentleman be compelled to confine his classical allusions to one quotation, he cannot do better than hang by that.

But has education been so general, and has it had the desired result?  In the City of Boston, as I have said, I found that in 1857 about one-eighth of the whole population were then on the books of the free public schools as pupils, and that about one-ninth of the population formed the average daily attendance.  To these numbers of course must be added all pupils of the richer classes—­those for whose education their parents chose to pay.  As nearly as I can learn, the average duration of each pupil’s schooling is six years, and if this be figured out statistically, I think it will show that education in Boston reaches a very large majority—­I might almost say the whole—­of the population.  That the education given in other towns of Massachusetts is not so good as that given in Boston I do not doubt, but I have reason to believe that it is quite as general.