OUR NATIONAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.

I.

THAT the provision made for universal education in the United States is worthy the attention of American citizens, and of statesmen of all nations, may be inferred from the efforts of distinguished men during the last two thousand years to promote learning in their respective countries. Passing over the endeavors made by the emperors of the great Roman Empire to found libraries and other institutions of learning, not to dwell upon the celebrated attempt of the illustrious Charlemagne to found schools throughout the large territory over which he reigned, or the noble labors of Alfred the Great to procure for his subjects the blessings of school instruction, it is perhaps especially interesting to regard for a moment the remarkable efforts made in past ages, by the great and learned Mohammedan caliphs, generals, and statesmen, to promote education throughout the vast domain which they had conquered with the sword.

3

1

Mohammed, probably copying to some extent from the command in the Jewish Scriptures to read and study the Mosaic law, had enjoined it upon his followers to read the Koran.2 The thirst for conquest of the followers of Mohammed partially satiated with the rivers of blood that they had shed, they turned their furious zeal into the cause of learning. Thousands of schools were opened to instruct youth in reading, so that the Koran could be studied. Schools and colleges were erected in connection with every mosque and village throughout a territory twice or thrice the size of Europe. Many libraries were established. In Spain alone, about the year 940, when the rest of Europe was passing through the dark ages, the Moors possessed seventeen universities and sixty-six public libraries. The number of volumes contained in the libraries was immense. In the one at Cordova there were six hundred thousand books. Even women, notwithstanding the position to which the Koran consigns them, were, in some respects, admirably educated. An historian3 of education remarks of this period, that the "devoirs paid by the chivalric knights to the ladies of their choice were as often in homage to their high intellectual endowment as to the charms of their beauty and virtue." The studies in the Mohammedan seminaries were liberal; and Christian and Jewish youth

1 Deut. xi. 18-20; 2 Tim. iii. 15-17.

2 Koran, chap. 96, &c.

8 Philobiblius, p. 109.