A munificent lady in Yorkshire has recently offered to subscribe 50,000_l_.
towards the endowment of an university _in that county_, and a noble earl
has professed his willingness to give a similar benefaction. These
princely examples will no doubt be followed ere long, and the scheme
completed--though we have some doubts whether the site of the new
university for the north would be best selected in Yorkshire.
* * * * *
Greater changes have taken place in no single age than are at this time in
progress; and the revolutions in which empires, kingdoms, or republics are
made and unmade, and political constitutions rise and burst like bubbles
upon a standing pool, when its stagnant waters are disturbed by a
thunder-shower, are not the most momentous of those changes, neither are
they those which most nearly concern us. The effects of the discovery of
printing could never be felt in their full extent by any nation, till
education, and the diffusion also of a certain kind of knowledge, had
become so general, that newspapers should be accessible to every body, and
the very lowest of the people should have opportunity to read them, or to
hear them read. The maxim that it is politic to keep the people in
ignorance, will not be maintained in any country where the rulers are
conscious of upright intentions, and confident likewise in the intrinsic
worth of the institutions which it is their duty to uphold, knowing those
institutions to be founded on the rock of righteous principles. They know,
also, that the best means of preserving them from danger is so to promote
the increase of general information, as to make the people perceive how
intimately their own well-being depends upon the stability of the state,
thus making them wise to obedience.
* * * * *
The heart and mind can as little lie barren as the earth whereon we move
and have our being, and which, if it produce not herbs and fruit meet for
the use of man, will be overrun with weeds and thorns. Muley Ismael, a
personage of tyrannical celebrity in his day, always employed his troops
in some active and useful work, when they were not engaged in war, "to
keep them," he said, "from being devoured by the worm of indolence." In
the same spirit one of our Elizabethan poets delivered his wholesome
advice:--
"Eschew the idle vein
Flee, flee from doing nought!
For never was there idle brain
But bred an idle thought."
* * * * *