Excerpt from Practical Suggestions for Reforming the Educational Institutions of Scotland: Being an Attempt to Point Out the Necessity for Desectarianising the Schools and Universities Simultaneously; And the Means Whereby This May Be Accomplished IT is as a question of Political Economy, not of Politics, that I have treated the subject of the following Letters. Others have very effectively denounced the injustice done by the existing laws to the many meritorious individuals who are excluded from offices of honour and emolument in one quarter, and in another, from the means of obtaining a livelihood. If I have been silent on this point, it is not that I feel indifferent to the wrongs of injured talent and worth, but that I have deemed it better to confine myself to the task of showing, on the acknowledged principles of Economic Science, that the sectarian character of our Educational Institutions inflicts the deepest injury on the community at large. As I have made the practical mischiefs of the existing system the chief ground of my pleadings for a change, so in inquiring into the amount of change we ought to demand, and the mode of effecting it, I have sought after a measure which should be practical and practicable. I wish to move as far in the right direction now, as we can manage to go. I wish the present move to be such that it shall be taken with perfect unanimity and harmony by all christian men, and such that it shall expose the selfishness and hypocrisy of those who will resist it, by taking away all pretext for representing the removal of sectarian restriction, as an unchristianising of our Educational Institutions. I have taken advantage of this republication in a separate form, to soften the unnecessarily severe language of one passage in the first letter; to introduce a few paragraphs into the second, which seemed important to my argument, though in my anxiety to condense they were originally left out; and to rectify a few obscurities or inaccuracies of diction, and a few typo graphical errors. I cannot conclude without expressing my acknowledgments for the kind ness and courtesy of the patriotic and amiable young Nobleman to whom the Letters are addressed, and my admiration of the candour and single minded anxiety for his country's best interests, which, as those who most widely differ with him acknowledge, I believe unanimously, have regulated his whole conduct with regard to Popular Education. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.