THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW
The clearing in the forest for the log schoolhouse where Lincoln got his
only formal schooling illustrates the beginning of the field of public
provision for culture, a territory then made up in that valley largely of
the white acres set apart from the domain of Louis XIV for the maintenance
of public schools. I can tell you out of my own experience how meagre that
provision was. Out on the open prairie a frame building--the successor of
the log cabin--was built. I think the ground on which it stood had never
been ploughed. I remember hearing, as if yesterday, a farmer's boy
reciting in it one day what we thought a piece of lasting eloquence: "Not
many generations ago where you now sit encircled by all the embellishments
of life, the wild fox dug his hole unscared and the Indian hunter pursued
the panting deer; here lived and learned another race of beings"--little
realizing that, except in the encircling embellishments, we were sitting
on such a site, and that we were the "new race of beings" and much nearer
to the stone-age man than were they who built the ancient wall just back
of the Pantheon in Paris.
The thought of the nation for to-morrow was tangibly represented only by
that hut twenty feet square, with its few nourishing acres, most
primitively furnished, a teacher of no training in the art of teaching, a
few tons of coal in a shed, a box of crayons, and perhaps a map. The
master made his own fires and swept unaided, or with the aid of his
pupils, the floor. When, years later, in a larger building on the same
site I came to be master of the same school, and gathered for work at
night the farmers' sons who could not leave the fields by day, except in
winter, I even paid the expense of the light. Now, if not on that site,
certainly on thousands of others, in schools springing from such
beginnings, the community provides not only chalk and electric light, but
pencils, paper, books, lenses, compasses, lathes, libraries, gymnastic
apparatus, pianos, and even food, if not free, at any rate at cost, in
addition to trained teachers, trained in public normal schools, and
janitors, and automatic ventilators to insure pure air, and thermostats to
preserve an even temperature. The public has become father, mother,
physician, and guild master as well as teacher of the new generation.
The public has even become the nurse, for in most of the large cities the
kindergarten has become transformed into a public institution which takes
the child from the home, sometimes almost from the cradle, but more often
from the street, at the age of four, five, or six years, and keeps it
until it is ready for the tuitions of the elementary grades. In St. Louis,
just across and up the river from Fort Chartres, where the initial
municipal experiment was made, there are now more than two hundred and
eighty-three such schools.
It has, moreover, gone beyond these serious maternal employments. The
strenuous civilization of the west has insisted that every man shall work.
But now that it has succeeded in this, it is not only beginning to insist
that he shall not work too much--the maximum hours of labor in many
employments being fixed by law--but he is being taught how to play wisely.
One of the most stirring books that I have read recently, "The Spirit of
Play and the City Streets," is an appeal written by Miss Addams, of
Chicago, whose noble work has been for years among the people who live
close by Marquette's portage hut--an appeal for the recognition of the
play instincts and their conversion into a greater permanent human
happiness. There are statistics which intimate that the per-hour
efficiency of men in some parts of America, whose number of hours of labor
has been lessened, has also been diminished--diminished because of their
imprudent use of their leisure, of their play time. So the thought of
social experts is turning to teaching children to play wisely, they whose
ancestors were compelled to leave off playing.
I speak of this here to intimate how far in its thought of the man of the
future, the nation of to-morrow, that valley has travelled-first of all in
its elementary training, and within much less than a half century, from
chalk to grand pianos, and from inexpensive tuitions in reading, writing,
and arithmetic to the dearer tuitions in singing, basket-weaving, cooking,
sewing, carpentering, drawing, and the trained teaching of the old
elementary subjects, with the addition of history, algebra, physiology,
Latin, and modern languages.
When the State of Iowa was admitted into the Union, in 1846, there were
100 log schoolhouses in use, valued each at $125. The latest statistics I
have at hand show that in 1912 the average value of the 13,870 school
properties in the State was $2,170, that the average expenditure for each
pupil was $28.86, and for each inhabitant $6.58, and that of the 507,109
pupils enrolled in the State only six per cent were in private schools--
the average for the States of the west varying from less than one per cent
to sixteen per cent.
The elementary school followed the frontier at even pace. It was usually
the first public building of every community, large or small. That
everybody saw it for what it was, I cannot maintain; but that it was the
symbol of the nation of to-morrow, borne daily before the people of the
present is certain. The westerners carried rails in the Lincoln campaign,
in their pride of his humble birth and vocation; they carried miniature
log cabins in another campaign in exaltation of another frontier hero.
They pictured ploughs and axes on the shields of their commonwealths. But
if one were to seek a symbol for the democracy of that valley, one could
find none more appropriate than the image of a frontier schoolhouse. It is
the most poetical thing of all that western landscape, when it is seen for
what it is, though it is not always architecturally imposing. A signal-
box, says an English essayist, such as one sees along the railroads, is
only called a signal-box, but it is the house of life and death, a place
"where men in an agony of vigilance light blood-red and sea-green fires to
keep other men from death." A post-box is only called a post-box; it is a
sanctuary of human words, a place to which "friends and lovers commit
their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred, and
not to be touched not only by others but even by themselves." [Footnote:
G. K. Chesterton, on Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his "Heretics," p. 41.] And
so a schoolhouse is only called a schoolhouse, but it is a place where the
invisible spirits of the past meet in the present the nascent spirits of
the future--the meetinghouse of the nation of yesterday and to-morrow. And
I would show that image of the schoolhouse upon a field of white, as
suggesting those white acres consecrated of the domain of Louis XIV to the
children of the west.
Some years ago, when walking across the island of Porto Rico in the West
Indies, just after its occupation and annexation by the United States, I
met in the interior mountains one morning a man carrying upon his
shoulders a basket filled with flowers, as it seemed to me at a distance.
As he approached, however, I saw that he was bearing the dead body of his
child, with flowers about it, to burial in consecrated ground miles away.
The first task of the new government there, as in the western States, was
to make fields consecrated for the living child, to set apart sites for
schoolhouses--the place for the common school.
That the common school has not in itself brought millennial conditions to
the valley we are aware, even as universal man suffrage has not brought
the full fruits of democracy. French philosophers and American patriots
alike have expected too much perhaps of an imperfect human nature. But
they have made their high demand of the only institution that can give in
full measure what is sought in a democracy.
First, it teaches the child the way and the means by which the race has
come out of barbarism and something of the rigor of the disciplines by
which civilization has been learned.
Second, it gives this teaching to the whole nation of to-morrow. There are
over ten million children in the public schools of that valley alone in
America, and, as I stated above, less than eight per cent in the private
schools; in the State of Indiana, where Lincoln had his slight schooling,
less than three per cent are in private schools-that is, practically the
entire people of the coming generation will have had some tuition of the
common school, some equality of fitting.
Third, as is to be inferred from the second fact, children of rich and
poor, of banker and mechanic, doctor and tradesman, come together, and in
a perfectly natural companionship, though in the great cities, where there
is less homogeneity, this mingling is somewhat disturbed by social
stratification and the great masses of immigrants.
So is the motto of the French Republic written the length and breadth of
that valley, though it may never actually be seen upon a lintel or door-
post: the "liberty" of access to the knowledges which are to assist in
making men as free as they can be; an elevating "equality" such as a State
can give to men of unequal endowments, capacities, and ambitions; and a
"fraternity" which is unconscious of else than real differences.
I gave intimation in an earlier chapter of the cosmopolitan quality of the
human material gathered into those houses of prophecy. There is separation
of Caucasian from African in the south, and there is more or less
unwilling association of Caucasian and Oriental in places of the far west
on the Pacific slope, but except for these and for individual instances
where, for example, the social extremes are brought together, these
minglings are but microcosms of the State itself. The schools are not in
that valley, in any sense, places provided by wealth for poverty, by one
class for another--charity schools; they are the natural meeting-houses of
democracy, with as little atmosphere of pauper or class schools as the
highways, on which even the President must obey the custom which controls
the humblest.
And let me say in passing: there is no body of men and women in America
more useful to the State, more high-minded, more patriotic, than the army
of public school-teachers--our great soldiery of peace.
They are a body six times the size of our standing army--more than a half-
million in number (547,289)--recruited from the best stock we have and
animated by higher purposes, more unselfish motives than any other half-
million public or private vocationalists of America. The total expenditure
for the common schools is but four and a half times the appropriation for
the standing army, though the number of teachers is six times (which
intimates how little we pay our public school-teachers relatively--
seventy-eight dollars per month to men, fifty-eight dollars to women
teachers). These men and women, who take the place of father, mother,
adviser, and nurse in the new industrial and social order--receive about
one and a quarter cents a day per inhabitant, man, woman, and child--a
little more than two sous per day.
It is this two-sous-per-day army that is our hope of to-morrow. It is
primarily upon its efficient valor that the future of democracy depends.
For it is they, rather than the parents, especially in the great cities
and in communities of large foreign elements, who have its making in their
hands. Without them the nation of to-morrow would be defenseless. She
would have to increase her standing army of soldiers, and even then, with
the multitudes of individual ignorances, malices, selfishnesses growing in
her own valleys and being disembarked by millions at her ports, she would
be powerless to defend her ideals.
One whom I have already quoted as speaking so disparagingly of Chicago
said that the most touching sight he saw in America was the marching of
the phalanxes of the nation of to-morrow past one of the generals or
colonels of that standing army of teachers. It was not in Chicago, but it
might have been. This particular phalanx had not been in America long.
They were singing "Sweet Land of Liberty" as they marched, swishing their
flags, and then they paused and repeated in broken speech:
"Flag of our great republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes,
whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we
salute thee! We, the natives of distant lands who find rest under thy
folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love and
protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people
forever." [Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 205.] A little
florid, you may say. "But think," said the English visitor, even as he
passed out into the filthy street, "think of the promise of it! Think of
the flower of belief that may spring from this warm sowing!"
And what gives most promise now is that this tuition has assumed a more
positive interest in the nation of to-morrow. The pioneer school was a
place of discipline, a place of fraternity, and it had the cooperation of
the home discipline and of the discipline of the primitive industrial life
in which the boy joined even during his school years. But that tuition was
in a sense as unsocialized as was the democracy of that day. It was
assumed that this meagre training would equip the boy with all the tools
of citizenship. Being able to read, write, and cipher, his own instincts
and interests would somehow procure good government and happiness.
Whatever patriotic stimulus his school gave him, as I recall out of my
experience, was through a history which engendered a feeling of hostility
toward England. That is being succeeded by a positive programme that
thinks very definitely of the boy's fullest development and of his social
spiritualization. The schoolhouse has become, or is in the way of
becoming, the civic centre of the nation.
But on top of the eight years' training of the elementary school, which
was considered at first the full measure of the obligation of the
community, the State in that region came to build additional years of
discipline--the high schools, first to equip young men for colleges or
universities and then to fit them for the meeting of the more highly
complex and specialized problems of life. These schools multiplied in the
upper Mississippi Valley at an extraordinary rate after the elementary
schools had prepared the way. In the northern part of that valley alone
sixteen hundred were established between 1860 and 1902. And there is
hardly a community of five thousand inhabitants that has not its fully
organized and well-equipped high or secondary school; while even towns of
a thousand inhabitants or less have made such provision.
Near the site of the village of the Illinois Indians, the village where
Père Marquette went from hut to hut in his ministries just before his
death journey; where La Salle gathered about his rock-built castle his red
allies to the number of thousands and attempted to build up what La Barre,
in his letter to Louis XIV, characterized as an imaginary kingdom for
himself--there is a beautiful river city, bearing the Indian name of
"Ottawa," and in the midst of it a large building that was for me the
capital of an imaginary kingdom, my one-time world, though it is called a
township high school. I speak of it because it is typical of the
instruction and influence that have come out of the long past, and that
are looking into the long future, in thousands of the towns and cities
that have each about them as many aspiring men, women, and youth as La
Salle had savage souls about his solitary castle in the wilderness.
These are the new Rocks St. Louis, these the eagles' nests of the new
Nouvelle France--I have visited scores of them--at Peoria, that was Fort
Crèvecoeur; at Joliet, where is now one of the best-equipped schools in
the valley; at Marquette, upon Lake Superior; at Chicago, where I spoke
one day to four thousand high-school boys and girls, for in most of these
schools the boys and girls are taught together. The valley has one of
these schools every few miles, where are gathered for the higher, sterner
disciplines of democracy those who wish to prepare themselves for its
larger service.
Their courses are four years in length, and, though varying widely, have
each a core of mathematics, English, foreign languages, and either science
or manual training or commerce. In some large cities the schools are
differentiated as general, manual training, and commercial. But the States
of that valley have not stopped here. With the encouragement of national
grants--again from the great domain of Louis XIV--they have established
universities with colleges of liberal arts and sciences, and schools of
agriculture, forestry, mining, engineering, pharmacy, veterinary surgery,
commerce, law, medicine, and philosophy. There is not a State in all that
valley that has not its university in name and in most instances in fact.
They admit both men and women and there is no fee, or only a nominal fee,
to residents of the State. These are the great strategic centres and
strongholds of the new democracy. A little way back from Cadillac's fort
on the Detroit River is one, the oldest, the University of Michigan--
founded in 1837--with 5,805 students. A few years ago I addressed there,
at commencement, over eight hundred candidates for degrees and diplomas in
law, medicine, pharmacy, liberal arts and science.
A little way from the Fox-Wisconsin portage is another, the University of
Wisconsin, with 5,970 students. A few years ago I sat in that beautiful
seat of learning among men from all parts of the world offering their
congratulations at its jubilee. And they sat in silk gowns only less
ornate than Nicolet's when he came over the rim of the basin to treat with
the Winnebagoes--whom he had supposed to be Chinese mandarins. I heard,
too, the graduates receive their degrees on theses ranging from the poetry
of a lesser Greek poet to the "pancreas of a cat." I spent a month in its
library at a later time and found it superior for my purposes to any other
in America.
No higher institution of learning in America is more strongly possessed by
the spirit of the ministry of scholarship directly to the people. It needs
sorely advice of the arts that centre in Paris, as most of those
universities do. It needs advice not of industry but of the indefatigable
disinterestedness of the French.
Behind the Falls of St. Anthony in the Mississippi River, first described
and named by Father Hennepin, is the University of Minnesota, with 6,642
students. The principal deity of the Sioux was supposed to live under
these falls, and Hennepin, the priest of Artois, speaks in his journal of
hearing one of the Indians at the portage around the falls, in loud and
lamenting voice haranguing the spirit to whom he had just hung a robe of
beaver-skin among the branches of a tree. The buildings that are and are
planned to be on this site would tell better than a chapter of description
what a single State has done and is purposing at this portage of St.
Anthony of Padua, where hardly more than a lifetime ago the savage was
sacrificing beaver-skins to the god of the Mississippi. There are many
great laboratories and academic buildings upon that high shore at present,
but a score more are in prospect for this mighty democratic university of
letters and science, law and medicine, that will house in other centuries
perhaps not merely the appeased spirit of the Mississippi but such
learning as is in Paris or was in Padua, whose saint is still remembered
by the falls; for the university has the necessary means. When the Église
of the Sorbonne, which Richelieu had consecrated, was being built, the
French priests out along the shores of Superior were preparing the way for
this new-world university. Certain lands in that iron region which they
first explored were given by the nation as dowry to the university. These
were not thought to be valuable, as at the time of the grant the most
valuable timber and farming land had been sold. Fifteen years ago, more or
less, a train-load of iron ore was brought down from that region to
Allouez, a town on the lake named in memory of the priest of St. Esprit--
and now the lands of the university are valued at from thirty to fifty
millions of dollars. [Footnote: "Forty Years at the University of
Minnesota," p. 243.]
One might follow the River Colbert all the way down the valley and trace
its branches to the mountains on either side, and find in every State some
such fortress: in Iowa a university with 2,255 students; in Illinois one
with 4,330; and so on to the banks of the river in Texas where La Salle
died--and there learn that the most extensive of all in its equipment may
some day rise. These, besides the scores of institutions of private
foundation, but compelled to the same public spirit as the State
universities, tell with what thought of to-morrow the geographical
descendants of France are doing their tasks of to-day, where Allouez and
Marquette, Hennepin and Du Lhut, Radisson and Groseilliers, and the Sieur
de la Salle wandered and suffered and died but yesterday,
Their paths have opened and multiplied not only into streets of cities and
highways and railroads but into curricula of the world's wisdoms, gathered
from Paris and Oxford and Edinburgh and Berlin and Bologna and Prague and
Salamanca, even as their students are being gathered from all peoples.
Perrot spoke truer than he knew when he said to the savages of Wisconsin,
"I am but the dawn of the day"; and the Indian chief who first of human
beings welcomed Europeans the other side of the Mississippi River spoke in
prophecy when he said that the earth had grown more beautiful with their
coming.
The common school, the high school, the college and university--the common
school compulsory for every child; the high school open to every boy and
girl, without regard to race, creed, or riches; the university accessible
to every young man and woman who has the ambition, the endurance, to make
his way or her way to the frontiers of the spirit and endure their
hardships! For I think of these universities as the free lands that were
out upon the borders of that valley, except that this frontier of the mind
will never, never find its limit. There will always be a frontier beyond,
for new settlers, new squatters, of the telescope which makes the universe
smaller, of the microscope which enlarges it, of the written word, the
spoken word, the unknown quantities, the philosophies of life. Do we not
see the illimitable fields opening even beyond the vision of those men of
the crucible and retort, who are but leading the new farmers on to visible
fields of increasing richness?
Hardly less cosmopolitan are the men of science and letters who are
actually in those regions, and only less so those tens of thousands, who,
like migrants of the earlier days, are going forward, many to the
farthest, lonesomest frontiers of knowledge, but all to something beyond
their immediate ancestral lot or field.
I am not thinking of the additions to the world's learning in all this,
great as it is but impossible of appraisement. Nor am I thinking chiefly
of the industrial and material advantages. I think it was some
bacteriological discovery, known as the Babcock test, resulting in a great
improvement in the making of butter, that gave the University of Wisconsin
its first wide sympathetic support. It was the discovery by a professor in
one of the western universities of the means of inoculating with some
fatal disease, and so exterminating, an insect that destroyed wheat and
oats, which gave that professor a chancellorship, I am told, and his
university more liberal appropriations. But those achievements and fames,
while not to be belittled, I have no wish to catalogue and recite here. I
am thinking of the social value of this great public educational system
that is thinking constantly of tomorrow--of the world markets of to-
morrow, to some extent, to which these curricula, as railroads' and ships'
courses, lead; of the world's letters of to-morrow, perhaps; but more
specifically and more especially of the higher happiness of those
particular regions and the success of its democracy. I am thinking of what
these institutions of the people's own devising are doing toward the
making of a homogeneous spirit, in which individual, disinterested, and
varied achievement will have a liberty to grow--as perhaps in no other
soil of earth.
Democritus said two thousand years and more ago: "Education and nature are
similar. For education transforms the man, and in transforming him creates
in him a new nature." The State in its three institutions--the common
school, the high school, the college and university--has many in its care
and under its tuitions for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, and in these
tuitions has she created in her children a new nature, whatever their
ancestry or place of birth. Memories of Europe's forges and trees, or
fields of roses and golden mountains, and even of Asia's wildernesses, are
in the names of many who enter those doors; the memories of other
languages are in the muscles of their tongues or the formation of their
organs of speech. Like the ancient Ephraimites at the fords of Jordan,
they cannot "frame to pronounce" certain words. And memories of
persecution or of vassalage are in the physical and mental attitudes of
some. But they are all reborn of a genealogy impersonal but loftier in its
gifts than any mere personal heritage--a genealogy which, like that of the
children of Deucalion, begins in the earth itself, the free soil.
I have often thought and spoken of how artificial differences disappear
when, let us say, Smith (English) and Schmidt (German) and Cohen (Hebrew),
Coletti (Italian) and D'Artagnan (French) and McGregor (Scotch) and Olsen
(Scandinavian) and McCarthy (Irish) and Winslow (of old America) travel
together through the parasangs of the "Anabasis," or together follow
Caesar into Gaul, or together compute a solar parallax, or build an arch,
or do any one of a thousand things that have no national boundaries or
racial characteristics. This is an extreme but not an unheard-of
assembling of elements which the State has the task of assimilating to its
own ideals.
I have not spoken, I cannot speak, of methods of that teaching, of its
shortcomings, of it crudities in many places, of its general want of
appreciation of form and color (of its particular need of France there),
of its utilitarian inclinations, and of its eager haste. The essential
thing that I have wanted to say is that this valley is not only more
democratic socially and politically than any other part of America, unless
it be that narrow strip farther west, but is also more consciously and
vitally and constantly concerned about the nation of to-morrow.
I spoke of the flaming ingot of steel swinging in the smoky ravine by the
site of Fort Duquesne as the symbol of the new human metal that is made of
the mingling of men of varied race, tradition, and ideals in the labor of
that continent. But above that in a clearer sky shines a more hopeful
symbol--the house of the school, the meeting-place of the invisible
spirits, the place of prophecy, pictured against a white field.
The historians have traced the origins of these institutions to New
England, to England, to Germany, to Greece. It is not remembered that
France went first and hallowed the fields. But it is my hope that out in
that valley, once a year, school and university may be led to look back to
the men who there ventured all for the "greater glory of God" and majesty
of France and found a field for the greater freedom and fraternity of
mankind.
My own thought goes back to the place by the St. Charles River where
Cartier's boat, which he could not take back to St. Malo because so many
of his men had died, was left to be buried by the river, the place where
Montcalm gathered his shattered army after the defeat on the Plains of
Abraham. It was there that a structure once stood, made of planks hewn out
of the forest, plastered with mud and thatched with long grass from the
meadows. It was the residence of Notre Dame des Anges, the house from
which the first martyrs were to go forth toward the west. This was, says
Parkman, the cradle of the great mission of New France. And to this my
thought goes as the precursor of the university in the Valley of the New
Democracy.