Conventions are the remedy against the errour of trusting to some dogma for a free government, and against the
danger of despair, whenever this dogma is exploded. That
liberty cannot exist without virtue, that it depends upon education, and that it is graduated by skilfully balancing the
members of the numerical analysis, are among the most specious and the most pernicious. In making virtue a necessary
antecedent to a free government, their natural moral order
is transposed, and the prospect for both is diminished.
Those moral principles upon which every fair association,
political or private, must be built, constitute in their operation a school for virtue, by the restraints or responsibilities of
which justice to associates is enforced, whilst morality is
impressed by habit. No opinion could be inculcated more
fatal to a science, than that it must precede instruction.
The second dogma is more dangerous, as containing a greater portion of truth; because education is undoubtedly one of
the sources of wisdom, although it might be fatal to a nation,
to mistake it for wisdom itself. Comparisons between the
Augustan, and some early age of the Roman Commonwealth;
between some Gothick age, and that of Lewis the 14th of
France; between England and France; and between Scotland
and the United States; would demonstrate that free government was not graduated by education. The refutation of
the third, as infinitely the most dangerous, has been the
chief object of these essays for although Mr. Adams himself has proved it to have been the most unfortunate of all
in practice, he has persuaded himself that it is the most perfect in theory.
Mr. Godwin has said, "that a scheme of national education is the most formidable and profound contrivance for despotism that imagination can suggest;"[1] and hence concludes that education ought to be left to itself. The philosophick, as well as the religious fanatick, must be detected, to come at practical truth. If education is this powerful
- ↑ Pol. Jus. vol. 2. p. 298.
