18 priates $2,336,000 less than the estimates, and Congress but the present. This Congress will expire un e 4th of March, 1873, and this appropriation is for the year ending on the 30th of June following. Under our present laws there will be no Congress in session between March and June of 1873; there will be no organized House of Representatives until the following December. We thought it unnecessary to appropriate a large sum of money for a Congress that will not assemble within the fiscal year for which these appropriations are made. We have made a reduction of $680,000 in the appropriation for assessing and collecting internal revenue; and that reduction is accomplished by a clause in the bill limiting the compensation of collectors of revenue to $4,500 a year, which limitation I hope will meet the approval of the House. The work of collecting the internal revenue has been greatly reduced and simplified, and a very general impression prevails that we pay too much money for the work. There are many other items of reduction which will be noticed as we proceed to consider the bill by sections. We have added a few clauses to protect the Treasury against fraudulent claims, and to cut off some expenditures which have grown up as a matter of custom, but which appear to us unnecessary. I may venture to say for the Committee on Appropriations, that, while they have endeavored to follow the line of rigid and reasonable economy, they have not forgotten the vastness and variety of the functions of the government, whose operations should be maintained vigorously and generously. It would be a mistake to cut down expenditures in any department, so as to cripple any work which must be done, and which can better be done at once and ended, by a liberal appropriation, than to drag on through a series of years by reason of insufficient appropriations. It is better to make a reduction of whole 16 When that can be done, than merely to cut down indi items. But I hope that members of the House will bear in mind that in many of our civil departments we have large forces of employees, which the settlement of war accounts made necessary, and which, when their work is done, it will require no little courage and effort to reduce to a peace basis. In doing so, it ⚫ would be well for us to adopt the sentiment recently expressed by Mr. Gladstone, in the House of Commons, that "the true way to save is not the cutting down of single items, but a more complete organization of our departments, and the determination that, for whatever the country spends, it shall have full value in labor, talents, or materials." In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I thank the members of the House for the patience with which they have listened to these dry details, and for the kind attention with which they have honored me. SEE the article entitled "National Appropriations and Misappropriations" for an interesting discussion of that part of this speech in which Mr. Garfield considers the future course of national expenditures in the United States. NATIONAL AID TO EDUCATION. SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. FEBRUARY 6, 1872. On the 15th of January, 1872, Mr. L. W. Perce, of Mississippi, introduced from the Committee on Education and Labor a bill to establish an Educational Fund, the first section of which provided that the net proceeds of the public lands should be forever set apart for the education of the people. Other sections provided that one half of such net proceeds, at the close of each fiscal year, should be invested in five per cent bonds of the United States, the same to constitute a perpetual educational fund; and that the other half of said proceeds, together with the yearly interest on the perpetual endowment, should be apportioned among the States for the purposes of common education, according to their population, on their complying with certain terms and conditions set forth in the bill. The bill passed the House, February 8, but was not considered in the Senate. Mr. Garfield supported the measure in this speech. "The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country."- JOHN Adams, Works, Vol. III. p. 457. "That all education should be in the hands of a centralized authority, whether composed of clergy or of philosophers, and be consequently all framed on the same model, and directed to the perpetuation of the same type, is a state of things which, instead of becoming more acceptable, will assuredly be more repugnant to mankind with every step of their progress in the unfettered exercise of their highest faculties." -JOHN STUART MILL, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, p. 92. MR. R. SPEAKER,- In the few minutes given me, I shall address myself to two questions. The first is, What do we propose by this bill to give to the cause of education? and the second is, How do we propose to give it? Is the gift itself wise? and is the mode in which we propose to give it wise? Answers to these questions will include all I have to say. And, first, we propose, without any change in the present land policy, to give the net proceeds of the public lands to the cause of education. During the last fifteen years these proceeds have amounted to a little more than thirty-three million dollars, or one per cent of the entire revenues of the United States for that period. The gift is not great; but yet, in one view of the case, it is princely. To dedicate to the cause of education, for the future, a fund which is now one per cent of the revenues of the United States, is, to my mind, a great thought, and I am glad to give it my indorsement. It seems to me that in this act we shall almost copy its prototype in what God himself has done on this great continent of ours. In the centre of its greatest breadth, where otherwise there might be a desert forever, he has planted a chain of the greatest lakes on the earth; and the exhalations arising from their pure waters every day come down in gracious showers, and make that a blooming garden which otherwise might be a desert waste. It is proposed that the proceeds arising from the sale of our wilderness lands, like the dew, shall fall forever, not upon the lands, but upon the minds of the children of the nation, giving them, for all time to come, all the blessing and growth and greatness that education can afford. That thought I say it again is a great one, worthy of a great nation; and this country will remember the man who formulated it into language, and will remember the Congress that made it law. The other point is one of even greater practical value and significance just now than the one to which I have referred. It is this: How is this great gift to be distributed? We propose to give it, Mr. Speaker, through our American system of education; and, in giving it, we do not propose to mar in the least degree the harmony and beauty of that system. If we did, I should be compelled to give my voice and vote against the measure. Here and now, when we are inaugurating this policy, I desire to state for myself, and, as I believe, for many who sit around me, that we do here solemnly protest that this gift is not to destroy or disturb what I venture to call our great American system of education, but is rather to be used through that system, and to be wholly subordinated to it. On this question I have been compelled heretofore to differ from many friends of education, here and elsewhere, many who think it wise. for Congress, in certain contingencies, to take charge of the system of education in the States. I will not now discuss the constitutional aspects of that question; but I desire to say, that all the philosophy of our educational system forbids that we should take such a course. In the few moments awarded to me, I wish to make an appeal for our system as a whole as against any other known to me. We look sometimes with great admiration at a government like Germany, that can command the light of its education to shine. everywhere, and can enforce its school laws everywhere, throughout the empire. Under our system we do not rejoice in that, but we rather rejoice that here two forces play with all their vast power in the field of education. The first is that of the local municipal authority under our State governments; there is the centre of responsibility; there is the chief educational power; there can be enforced Luther's great thought of placing on magistrates the duty of educating children. Luther was the first to perceive that Christian schools were an absolute necessity. In a celebrated paper addressed to the municipal councillors of the Empire in 1524, he demanded the establishment of schools in all the villages of Germany. To tolerate ignorance was, in the energetic language of the reformer, to make common cause with the Devil. The father of a family who abandoned his children to ignorance was a consummate rascal. Addressing the German authorities, he said: "Magistrates, remember that God formally commands you to instruct children. This Divine commandment parents have transgressed by indolence, by lack of intelligence, and because of over work. The duty devolves upon you, magistrates, to call fathers to their duty, and to prevent the return of these evils which we suffer to-day. "Give attention to your children; many parents are like ostriches, .. content to have laid an egg, but caring for it no longer. Now, that which constitutes the prosperity of a city is not its treasures, its strong walls, its beautiful mansions, and its brilliant decorations. The real wealth of a city, its safety and its force, is an abundance of citizens, instructed, honest, and cultivated. If in our days we rarely meet such citizens, whose fault is it, if not yours, magistrates, who have allowed our youth to grow up like neglected shrubbery in the forest? Ignorance is more dangerous for a people than the armies of an enemy." After quoting this passage from Luther, Laboulaye, in his eloquent essay entitled, L'État et ses Limites, says: "This familiar and true eloquence was not lost. There is not a Protestant |