a good man to wish it when the world needs him here so much. It is weak
and unmanly to be always looking and sighing voluptuously for that. But
it is of great comfort to have in your soul a sure trust in
immortality; of great value here and now to anticipate time and live
to-day the eternal life. That we may all do. The joys of heaven will
begin as soon as we attain the character of heaven and do its duties.
That may begin to-day. It is everlasting life to know God, to have His
Spirit dwelling in you, yourself at one with Him. Try that and prove its
worth. Justice, usefulness, wisdom, religion, love, are the best things
we hope for in Heaven. Try them on--they will fit you here not less
becomingly. They are the best things of earth. Think no outlay of
goodness and piety too great. You will find your reward begin here. As
much goodness and piety, so much Heaven. Men will not pay you--God will;
pay you now; pay you hereafter and for ever.
IV.
THE PUBLIC EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE.--AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE
ONONDAGA TEACHERS' INSTITUTE, AT SYRACUSE, NEW YORK, OCTOBER 4, 1849.
Education is the developing and furnishing of the faculties of man. To
educate the people is one of the functions of the State. It is generally
allowed in the free States of America, that the community owes each
child born into it a chance for education, intellectual, moral, and
religious. Hence the child has a just and recognized claim on the
community for the means of this education, which is to be afforded him,
not as a charity, but as a right.
The fact indicates the progress mankind has made in not many years. Once
the state only took charge of the military education of the people; not
at all of their intellectual, moral, or religious culture. They received
their military discipline, not for the special and personal advantage of
the individuals, Thomas and Oliver, but for the benefit of the state.
They received it, not because they were men claiming it in virtue of
their manhood, but as subjects of the state, because their military
training was needful for the state, or for its rulers who took the name
thereof. Then the only culture which the community took public pains to
bestow on its members, was training them to destroy. The few, destined
to command, learned the science of destruction, and the kindred science
of defence; the many, doomed to obey, learned only the art to destroy,
and the kindred art of defence.
The ablest men of the nation were sought out for military teachers,
giving practical lessons of the science and the art; they were covered
with honor and loaded with gold. The wealth of the people and their
highest science went to this work. Institutions were founded to promote
this education, and carefully watched over by the state, for it was
thought the Commonwealth depended on disciplined valor. The soldier was
thought to be the type of the state, the archetype of man; accordingly
the highest spiritual function of the state was the production of
soldiers.
* * * * *
Most of the civilized nations have passed through that stage of their
development: though the few or the many are still taught the science or
the art of war in all countries called Christian, there is yet a class
of men for whom the state furnishes the means of education that is not
military; means of education which the individuals of that class could
not provide for themselves. This provision is made at the cost of the
state; that is, at the cost of every man in the state, for what the
public pays, you pay and I pay, rich or poor, willingly and consciously,
or otherwise. This class of men is different in different countries, and
their education is modified to suit the form of government and the idea
of the state. In Rome the state provides for the public education of
priests. Rome is an ecclesiastical state; her government is a
Theocracy--a government of all the people, but by the priests, for the
sake of the priests, and in the name of God. Place in the church is
power, bringing honor and wealth; no place out of the church is of much
value. The offices are filled by priests, the chief magistrate is a
priest, supposed to derive his power and right to rule, not
democratically, from the people, or royally, by inheritance,--for in
theory the priest is as if he had no father, as theoretically he has no
child,--but theocratically from God.
In Rome the priesthood is thought to be the flower of the state. The
most important spiritual function of the state, therefore, is the
production of priests; accordingly the greatest pains are taken with
their education. Institutions are founded at the public cost, to make
priests out of men; these institutions are the favorites of government,
well ordered, well watched over, well attended, and richly honored.
Institutions for the education of the people are of small account, ill
endowed, watched over but poorly, thinly attended, and not honored at
all. The people are designed to be subjects of the church, and as little
culture is needed for that, though much to make them citizens thereof,
so little is given.
As there are institutions for the education of the priests, so there is
a class of men devoted to that work; able men, well disciplined,
sometimes men born with genius, and always men furnished with the
accomplishments of sacerdotal and scientific art; very able men, very
well disciplined, the most learned and accomplished men in the land.
These men are well paid and abundantly honored, for on their
faithfulness the power of the priesthood, and so the welfare of the
state, is thought to depend. Without the allurement of wealth and
honors, these able men would not come to this work; and without the help
of their ability, the priests could not be well educated. Hence their
power would decline; the class, tonsured and consecrated but not
instructed, would fall into contempt; the theocracy would end. So the
educators of the priests are held in honor, surrounded by baits for
vulgar eyes; but the public educators of the people, chiefly women or
ignorant men, are held in small esteem. The very buildings destined to
the education of the priests are conspicuous and stately; the colleges
of the Jesuits, the Propaganda, the seminaries for the education of
priests, the monasteries for training the more wealthy and _regular_
clergy, are great establishments, provided with libraries, and furnished
with all the apparatus needful for their important work. But the
school-houses for the people are small and mean buildings, ill made, ill
furnished, and designed for a work thought to be of little moment. All
this is in strict harmony with the idea of the theocracy, where the
priesthood is mighty and the people are subjects of the Church; where
the effort of the state is toward producing a priest.
* * * * *
In England the state takes charge of the education of another class, the
nobility and gentry; that is, of young men of ancient and historical
families, the nobility, and young men of fortune, the gentry. England is
an oligarchical state; her government an aristocracy, the government of
all by a few, the nobility and gentry, for the sake of a few, and in the
name of a king. There the foundation of power is wealth and birth from a
noble family. The union of both takes place in a wealthy noble. There,
nobility is the blossom of the state; aristocratic birth brings wealth,
office, and their consequent social distinction. Political offices are
chiefly monopolized by men of famous birth or great riches. The king,
the chief officer of the land, must surpass all others in wealth, and
the pomp and circumstance which comes thereof, and in aristocracy of
birth. He is not merely noble but royal; his right to rule is not at
all derived from the people, but from his birth. Thus he has the two
essentials of aristocratic influence, birth and wealth, not merely in
the heroic degree, but in the supreme degree.
As the state is an aristocracy, its most important spiritual function is
the production of aristocrats; each noble family transmits the full
power of its blood only to a single person--the oldest son; of the
highest form, the royal, only one is supposed to be born in a
generation, only one who receives and transmits in full the blood royal.
As the nobility are the blossom of the state, great pains must be taken
with the education of those persons born of patrician or wealthy
families. As England is not merely a military or ecclesiastical state,
though partaking largely of both, but commercial, agricultural and
productive in many ways; as she holds a very prominent place in the
politics of the world, so there must be a good general education
provided for these persons; otherwise their power would decline, the
nobility and gentry sink into contempt, and the government pass into
other hands,--for though a man may be born to rank and wealth, he is not
born to knowledge, nor to practical skill. Hence institutions are
founded for the education of the aristocratic class: Oxford and
Cambridge, "those twins of learning," with their preparatories and
help-meets.
The design of these institutions is to educate the young men of family
and fortune. The aim in their academic culture is not as in Pagan Rome,
a military state, to make soldiers, nor as in Christian Rome, to turn
out priests; it is not, as in the German universities, to furnish the
world with scholars and philosophers, men of letters and science, but to
mature and furnish the gentleman, in the technical sense of that word, a
person conventionally fitted to do the work of a complicated
aristocratic state, to fill with honor its various offices, military,
political, ecclesiastical or social, and enjoy the dignity which comes
thereof. These universities furnish the individual who resorts thither
with opportunities not otherwise to be had; they are purchased at the
cost of the state, at the cost of each man in the state. The alumnus at
Oxford pays his term-bills, indeed, but the amount thereof is a trifle
compared to the actual cost of his residence there; mankind pays the
residue.
These institutions are continually watched over by the state, which is
the official guardian of aristocratic education; they are occasionally
assisted by grants from the public treasury, though they are chiefly
endowed by the voluntary gifts of individual men. But these private
gifts, like the public grants, come from the earnings of the whole
nation. They are well endowed, superintended well, and richly honored;
their chancellors and vice-chancellors are men of distinguished social
rank; they have their representatives in Parliament; able men are sought
out for teachers, professors, heads of houses; men of good ability, of
masterly education, and the accomplishments of a finished gentleman;
they are well paid, and copiously rewarded with honors and social
distinction. Gentility favors these institutions; nobility watches over
them, and royalty smiles upon them. In this threefold sunlight, no
wonder that they thrive. The buildings at their service are among the
most costly and elegant in the land; large museums are attached to them,
and immense libraries; every printer in England, at his own cost, must
give a copy of each book he publishes to Cambridge and Oxford. What
wealth can buy, or artistic genius can create, is there devoted to the
culture of this powerful class.
But while the nobility and gentry are reckoned the flower of the state,
the common people are only the leaves, and therefore thought of small
importance in the political botany of the nation. Their education is
amazingly neglected; is mainly left to the accidental piety of private
Christians, to the transient charity of philanthropic men, or the
"enlightened self-interest" of mechanics and small-traders, who now and
then found institutions for the education of some small fraction of the
multitude. But such institutions are little favored by the government,
or the spirit of the dominant class; gentility does not frequent them,
nor nobility help them, nor royalty watch over to foster and to bless.
The Parliament, which voted one hundred thousand pounds of the nation's
money for the queen's horses and hounds, had but thirty thousand to
spare for the education of her people. No honor attends the educators of
the people; no wealth is heaped up for them; no beautiful buildings are
erected for their use; no great libraries got ready at the public
charge; no costly buildings are provided. You wonder at the colleges and
collegiate churches of Oxford and of Cambridge; at the magnificence of
public edifices in London, new or ancient--the House of Parliament, the
Bank, the palaces of royal and noble men, the splendor of the
churches--but you ask, where are the school-houses for the people? You
go to Bridewell and Newgate for the answer. All this is consistent with
the idea of an aristocracy. The gentleman is the type of the state; and
the effort of the state is towards producing him. The people require
only education enough to become the servants of the gentleman, and seem
not to be valued for their own sake, but only as they furnish pabulum
for the flower of the oligarchy.
In Rome and England, great sums have been given by wealthy men, and by
the state itself, to furnish the means of a theocratic or aristocratic
education to a certain class; and to produce the national priests, and
the national gentlemen. There public education is the privilege of a
few, but bought at the cost of the many; for the plough-boy in
Yorkshire, who has not culture enough to read the petition for daily
bread in the Lord's Prayer, helps pay the salary of the Master of
Trinity, and the swine-herd in the Roman Campagna, who knows nothing of
religion, except what he learns at Christmas and Easter, by seeing the
Pope carried on men's shoulders into St. Peter's, helps support the
Propaganda and the Roman College. The privileged classes are to receive
an education under the eye of the state, which considers itself bound to
furnish them the means of a public education, partly at the individual's
cost, chiefly at the cost of the public. The amount of education depends
on three things:--on the educational attainments of the human race; on
the wealth and tranquillity of the special nation, enabling it to avail
itself of that general attainment; and on the natural powers and
industry of the particular individual in the nation. Such is the
solidarity of mankind that the development of the individual thus
depends on that of the race, and the education of a priest in Rome or a
gentleman in England is the resultant of these three forces,--the
attainment of mankind, the power of the nation, and the private
character and conduct of the man himself. Each of these three is a
variable and not a constant quantity. So the amount of education which a
man can receive at Oxford or at Rome fluctuates and depends on the
state of the nation and of the world; but as the attainments of mankind
have much increased within a few years, as the wealth of England has
increased, and her tranquillity become more secure, you see how easy it
becomes for the state to offer each gentleman an amount of education
which it would have been quite impossible to furnish in the time of the
Yorks and the Lancasters.
* * * * *
In America things are quite other and different. I speak of the Free
States of the North; the Slave States have the worst features of an
oligarchy combined with a theocratic pride of caste, which generates
continual unkindness; there the idea of the state is found inconsistent
with the general and public education of the people; it is as much so in
South Carolina as in England or Rome; even more so, for the public and
general culture of all is only dangerous to a theocracy or aristocracy
while it is directly fatal to slavery. In England, and still more in
Catholic Rome, the churches--themselves a wonderful museum of
curiosities, and open all the day to all persons--form an important
element for the education of the most neglected class. But slavery and
education of the people are incommensurable quantities. No amount of
violence can be their common measure. The republic, where master and
slave were equally educated, would soon be a red-republic. The
slave-master knows this, and accordingly puts education to the ban, and
glories in keeping three million barbarians in the land, and, of course,
suffers the necessary degradation which comes thereof. But in the free
states of the North the government is not a theocracy, or an
aristocracy; the state, in theory is not for the few, nor even for the
majority, but for all; classes are not recognized, and therefore not
protected in any privilege. The government is a democracy, the
government of all, by all, for all, and in the name of all. A man is
born to all the rights of mankind; all are born to them, so all are
equal. Therefore, what the state pays for, not only comes at the cost of
all, but must be for the use and benefit of all. Accordingly, as a
theocracy demands the education of priests, and an aristocracy that of
the nobility and the gentry, so a democracy demands the education of
all. The aim must be, not to make priests and gentlemen of a few, a
privileged class, but to make men of all; that is, to give a normal and
healthy development of their intellectual, moral, affectional and
religious faculties, to furnish and instruct them with the most
important elementary knowledge, to extend this development and
furnishing of the faculties as far as possible.
Institutions must be founded for this purpose--to educate all, rich and
poor, men well-born with good abilities, men ill-born with slender
natural powers. In New England, these institutions have long since been
founded at the public cost, and watched over with paternal care, as the
ark of our covenant, the palladium of our nation. It has been recognized
as a theory, and practised on as a fact, that all the property in the
land is held by the state for the public education of the people, as it
is for their defence; that property is amenable to education as to
military defence.
In a democracy there are two reasons why this theory and practice
prevail. One is a political reason. It is for the advantage of the
state; for each man that keeps out of the jail and the poor-house,
becomes a voter at one-and-twenty; he may have some office of trust and
honor; the highest office is open before him. As so much depends on his
voting wisely, he must have a chance to qualify himself for his right of
electing and of being elected. It is as necessary now in a democracy,
and as much demanded by the idea thereof, that all should be thus
qualified by education, as it once was in a military state, that all
should be bred up soldiers.
The other is a philosophical reason. It is for the advantage of the
individual himself, irrespective of the state. The man is a man, an
integer, and the state is for him; as well as a fraction of the state,
and he for it. He has a man's rights; and, however inferior in might to
any other man, born of parentage how humble soever, to no wealth at all,
with a body never so feeble, he is yet a man, and so equal in rights to
any other man born of a famous line, rich and able; of course he has a
right to a chance for the best culture which the educational attainment
of mankind, and the circumstances of the nation render possible to any
man; to so much thereof as he has the inborn power and the voluntary
industry to acquire. This conclusion is getting acted on in New England,
and there are schools for the dumb and the blind, even for the idiot and
the convict.
So, then, as the idea of our government demands the education of all,
the amount of education must depend on the same three variables
mentioned before; it must be as good as it is possible for them to
afford. The democratic state has never done its political and
educational duty, until it affords every man a chance to obtain the
greatest amount of education which the attainment of mankind renders it
possible for the nation, in its actual circumstances, to command, and
the man's nature and disposition render it possible for him to take.
Looking at the matter politically, from the point of view of the State,
each man must have education enough to exercise his rights of electing
and being elected. It is not easy to fix the limits of the amount; it is
also a variable continually increasing. Looking at the matter
philosophically, from the point of view of the individual, there is no
limit but the attainment of the race and the individual's capacity for
development and growth. Only a few men will master all which the
circumstances of the nation and the world render attainable; some will
come short for lack of power, others for lack of inclination. Make
education as accessible as it can now be made, as attractive as the
teachers of this age can render it, the majority will still get along
with the smallest amount that is possible or reputable. Only a few will
strive for the most they can get. There will be many a thousand farmers,
traders, and mechanics in their various callings, manual and
intellectual, to a single philosopher. This also is as it should be, and
corresponds with the nature of man and his function on the earth. Still
all have the natural right to the means of education to this extent, by
fulfilling its condition.
To accomplish this work, the democratic education of the whole people,
with the aim of making them men, we want public institutions founded by
the people, paid for by the public money; institutions well endowed,
well attended, watched over well, and proportionably honored; we want
teachers, able men, well disciplined, well paid, and honored in
proportion to their work. It is a good thing to educate the privileged
classes, priests in a theocracy, and gentlemen in an aristocracy. Though
they are few in number, it is a great work; the servants thereof are not
too well paid, nor too much held in esteem in England, nor in Rome, nor
too well furnished with apparatus. But the public education of a whole
people is a greater work, far more difficult, and should be attended
with corresponding honor, and watched over even more carefully by the
state.
After the grown men of any country have provided for their own physical
wants, and insured the needful physical comforts, their most important
business is to educate themselves still further, and train up the rising
generation to their own level. It is important to leave behind us
cultivated lands, houses and shops, railroads and mills, but more
important to leave behind us men grown, men that are men; such are the
seed of material wealth,--not it of them. The highest use of material
wealth is its educational function.
Now the attainments of the human race increase with each generation; the
four leading nations of Christendom, England, France, Germany, and the
United States, within a hundred years, have apparently, at the least,
doubled their spiritual attainments; in the free states of America,
there is a constant and rapid increase of wealth, far beyond the
simultaneous increase of numbers; so not only does the educational
achievement of mankind become greater each age, but the power of the
state to afford each man a better chance for a better education,
greatens continually, the educational ability of the state enlarging as
those two factors get augmented. The generation now grown up, is,
therefore, able and bound to get a better culture than their fathers,
and leave to their own children a chance still greater.
Each child of genius, in the nineteenth century, is born at the foot of
the ladder of learning, as completely as the first child, with the same
bodily and spiritual nakedness; though of the most civilized race, with
six, or sixty thousands of years behind him, he must begin with nothing
but himself. Yet such is the union of all mankind, that, with the aid of
the present generation, in a few years he will learn all that mankind
has learned in its long history; next go beyond that, discovering and
creating anew; and then draw up to the same height the new generation,
which will presently surpass him.
* * * * *