To the Honorable,

The Legislature of Maryland.

Gentlemen:—I hope it will not be considered an improper
liberty for one of your constituents to offer a few crude sugges-
tions on the important subject of Education. I have no perso-
nal or pecuniary interest to subserve either for myself or for any one
and no other motive than a desire to aid in advancing the most
important cause in our State.

In common with many who are parents and trustees in our
Primary Schools and Academies. I am deeply impressed with
the defects of most of our Schools and the necessity of adopting
some mode of providing a supply of Teachers of the highest
order and whose system of instruction and discipline will be of
the best kind.

The best system is of little value unless administered by com-
petent officers.

The only certain mode of procuring these is to educate them
expressly for the purpose, and if this can be done both well and
cheaply the mode of doing it cannot be a bad one.

Among the few institutions in the country in which the high-
est degree of efficiency has been attained, there are three which
are pre-eminent above all others. These are the United States
Military Academy at West Point, the United States Naval Acad-
emy at Annapolis and the Virginia Military Institute at Lexing-
ton, Virginia. In all of these the system is the same and has
been copied from the Polytechnic School of France.

It is a system of minute and rigid accountability, where merit
is sure to be rewarded and demerit sure to be punished, and has
proved both in Europe and America more perfect than any other
system.

" The discipline which teaches a youth to have respect to
little things and fixes his principles as a habit, by inculcating that
no duty is too trifling to be neglected, no offence too light to be
overlooked, will do more to qualify him for the active duties of
life than any thing else."

To Virginia, the mother of so many great men, belongs the
honor of being the first to adapt this system to a State institu-
tion and to show that every State can have, in addition to its
other institutions, a West Point of its own.

That whilst a portion of its youths are provided with the best