DEDICATION.
TO THE
TEACHERS OF THE NORMAL SCHOOL
OF THE STATE OF NEW-YORK.
Gentlemen:—
A stirring freshness in the air, and ruddy streaks upon the horizon of the moral world betoken the grateful dawning of a new era. The days of a drivelling instruction are departing. With us is the opening promise of a better time, wherein genuine manhood doing its noblest work shall have adequate reward. Teacher is the highest and most responsible office man can fill. Its dignity is, and will yet be held commensurate with its duty—a duty boundless as man's intellectual capacity, and great as his moral need—a duty from the performance of which shall emanate an influence not limited to the now and the here, but which surely will, as time flows into eternity and space into infinity, roll up, a measureless curse or a measureless blessing, in inconceivable swellings along the infinite curve. It is an office that should be esteemed of even sacred import in this country. Ere long a hundred millions, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Baffin's Bay to that of Panama, shall call themselves American citizens. What a field for those two master-passions of the human soul—the love of Rule, and the love of Gain! How shall our liberties continue to be preserved from the graspings of Ambition and the corruptions of Gold? Not by Bills of Rights
