autumn afternoon; but it is not every day that the daughter of the owner
of one-half the mills in a manufacturing town is married to the owner of
the other half, and when such things do occur to the accompaniment of
illustrious visitors, a half-holiday in all the mills, perfect weather,
and unlimited hospitality, it behooves the progressive journalist and
reporter for miles around to sing "haste to the wedding," and to draw
largely upon his adjectives and his fountain pen. The editorial staff of
the Arcady _Herald-Journal_ turned homeward, and was evolving phrases in
which to describe that gala day when his eye caught the color of a
familiar little sunbonnet, the outline of a familiar little figure. But
such a drooping little sunbonnet! Such a relaxed little figure! Such a
weary little face! And such a wildly impossible place in which to find a
little daughter. Then he remembered having seen Miss Ann and Miss Agnes
among the spectators and his wonder changed to indignation.
It was nearly dark when Mary opened her eyes again and found herself
sheltered in her father's arm and rocked by the old familiar motion of
the buggy.
"And then," she prompted sleepily as her old habit was, "what did they
do then?"
"They were married," his quiet voice replied.
"And then?"
"Oh, then they went away together and lived happily ever after."
For some space there was silence and a star came out. Mary watched it
drowsily and then drowsily began:
"When I was to Camelot--"
"Where?" demanded her father.
"When I was to Camelot," she repeated, cuddling close to him as if to
show that there were dearer places than that gorgeous city, "I saw a
knight and a lady getting married. And lots of other knights were
there--they didn't wear their fighting clothes--and lots of other
ladies, pink ones. An' Arthur wore a stovepipe hat an' Guinevere wore a
white dress, an' she had white feathers in her crown. An' Lancelot, he
was there, all getting married. Daddy, dear," she broke off to question,
"were you ever to Camelot?"
"Oh, yes, I was there," he answered, "but it was a great many years
ago."
"Did you find roses?" she asked, exhibiting her wilted treasures.
"I found your mother there, my dear."
"And then, what did you do then?"
"Well, then we were married and lived happily ever after."
"And then--?"
"There was you, and we lived happier ever after."
And Mary fell on sleep again in the shelter of her father's arm while the
stars came out and the glow of joyant Camelot lit all the southern sky.
GREAT OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS
Among the influences which, in America, promote harmony between alien
races, the public school plays a most important part. The children, the
teachers, the parents--whether of emigrant or native origin--the
relatives and friends in distant countries, are all brought more or less
under its amalgamating influences. In the schoolroom the child finds
friends and playmates belonging to races widely different from his own;
there Greek meets not only Greek, but Turk, American, Irish, German,
French, English, Italian and Hungarian, and representatives of every
other nation under the sun. The lion lying down with the lamb was
nothing to it, because the lamb, though its feelings are not enlarged
upon, must have been distinctly uncomfortable. But in the schoolroom
Jew and Gentile work and play together; and black and white learn love
and knowledge side by side.
And long after more formal instruction has faded with the passing of the
years a man of, perhaps, German origin will think kindly of the whole
irresponsible Irish race when he remembers little Bridget O'Connor, who
sat across the aisle in the old Cherry Street school, her quick temper
and her swift remorse.
Of course, all these nationalities are rarely encountered in one
district, but a teacher often finds herself responsible for fifty
children representing five or six of them. In the lower grades eight or
ten may be so lately arrived as to speak no English. The teacher
presiding over this polyglot community is often, herself, of foreign
birth, yet they get on very well together, are very fond of one another,
and very happy. The little foreigners, assisted by their more
well-informed comrades, learn the language of the land, I regret to say
that it is often tinctured with the language of the Bowery, in from six
to twelve weeks, six weeks for the Jews, and twelve for the slower among
the Germans' children. And again, it will be difficult to stir Otto
Schmidt, at any stage of his career, into antagonism against the Jewish
race, when he remembers the patience and loving kindness with which
Maxie Fishandler labored with him and guided his first steps through the
wilderness of the English tongue.
These indirect but constant influences are undeniably the strongest, but
at school the child is taught in history of the heroism and the strength
of men and nations other than his own; he learns, with some degree of
consternation, that Christopher Columbus was a "Dago," George Washington
an officer in the English Army, and Christ, our Lord, a Jew. Geography,
as it is now taught with copious illustrations and descriptions, shows
undreamed-of beauties in countries hitherto despised. And gradually, as
the pupils move on from class to class, they learn true democracy and
man's brotherhood to man.
But the work of the American public school does not stop with the
children who come directly under its control. The board of education
reaches, as no other organization does, the great mass of the
population. All the other boards and departments established for the
help and guidance of these people only succeed in badgering and
frightening them. They are met, even at Ellis Island, by the board of
health and they are subjected to all kinds of disagreeable and
humiliating experiences culminating sometimes in quarantine and
sometimes in deportation. Even after they have passed the barrier of the
emigration office, the monster still pursues them. It disinfects their
houses, it confiscates the rotten fish and vegetables which they
hopefully display on their push-carts, it objects to their wrenching off
and selling the plumbing appliances in their apartments, it interferes
with them in twenty ways a day and hedges them round about with a
hundred laws which they can only learn, as Parnell advised a follower to
learn the rules of the House of Commons, by breaking them.
Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary
ideas of the use of a thoroughfare. The new-comer is taught that the
street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other
trifles for which he has no further use. Neither may it be used, except
with restrictions, as a bedroom or a nursery. The emigrant, puzzled but
obliging, picks his progeny out of the gutter and lays it on the
fire-escape. He then makes acquaintance of the fire department, and
listens to its heated arguments. So perhaps he, still willing to please,
reclaims the dead cat and the cabbage stalk, and proceeds to cremate
them in the privacy of the back yard. Again the fire department, this
time in snorting and horrible form, descends upon him. And all these
manifestations of freedom are attended by the blue-coated police who
interdict the few relaxations unprovided for by the other powers. These
human monsters confiscate stilettos and razors; discourage
pocket-picking, brick-throwing, the gathering of crowds and the general
enjoyment of life. Their name is legion. Their appetite for figs, dates,
oranges and bananas and graft is insatiable; they are omnipresent; they
are argus-eyed; and their speech is always, "Keep movin' there. Keep
movin'." And all these baneful influences may be summoned and set in
action by another, but worse than all of them, known as the Gerry
Society. This tyrant denies the parent's right in his own child, forbids
him to allow a minor to work in sweatshop, store, or even on the stage,
and enforces these commands, even to the extreme of removing the child
altogether and putting it in an institution.
In sharp contrast to all these ogres, the board of education shines
benignant and bland. Here is power making itself manifest in the form of
young ladies, kindly of eye and speech, who take a sweet and friendly
interest in the children and all that concerns them. Woman meets woman
and no policeman interferes. The little ones are cared for, instructed,
kept out of mischief for five hours a day, taught the language and
customs of the country in which they are to make their living or their
fortunes; and generally, though the board of education does not insist
upon it, they are cherished and watched over. Doctors attend them,
nurses wait upon them, dentists torture them, oculists test them.
Friendships frequently spring up between parent and teacher, and it
often lies in the power of the latter to be of service by giving either
advice or more substantial aid. At Mothers' meetings the cultivation of
tolerance still goes on. There, women of widely different class and
nationality, meet on the common ground of their children's welfare. Then
there are roof gardens, recreation piers and parks, barges and
excursions, all designed to help the poorer part of the city's
population--without regard to creed or nationality--to bear and to help
their children to bear the killing heat of summer. So Jew and Gentile,
black and white, commingle; and gradually old hostilities are forgotten
or corrected. The board of education provides night schools for adults
and free lectures upon every conceivable interesting topic, including
the history and geography and natural history of distant lands.
Travelers always draw large audiences to their lectures.
The children soon learn to read well enough to translate the American
papers and there are always newspapers in the different vernaculars, so
that the emigrant soon becomes interested not only in the news of his
own country, but in the multitudinous topics which go to make up
American life. He soon grasps at least the outlines of politics,
national and international, and before he can speak English he will
address an audience of his fellow countrymen on "Our Glorious American
Institutions."
It is not only the emigrant parent who profits by the work of the public
school. The American parent also finds himself, or generally herself,
brought into friendly contact with the foreign teachers and the foreign
friends of her children. The New York public school system culminates in
the Normal College, which trains women as teachers, and the College of
the City of New York, which offers courses to young men in the
profession of law, engineering, teaching, and, besides, a course in
business training. The commencement at these institutions brings
strangely contrasted parents together in a common interest and a common
pride. The students seem much like one another, but the parents are so
widely dissimilar as to make the similarity of their offspring an
amazing fact for contemplation. Mothers with shawls over their heads and
work-distorted hands sit beside mothers in Parisian costumes, and the
silk-clad woman is generally clever enough to appreciate and to admire
the spirit which strengthened her weary neighbor through all the years
of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to
pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter. The feeling of
inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may
humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good. It will
certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and
conditions unknown to her. It will also utterly do away with many of her
prejudices against the foreigner and it will make the "Let them eat
cake" attitude impossible.
And so the child, the parent, the teacher and the home-staying relative
are brought to feel their kinship with all the world through the agency
of the public school, but the teacher learns the lesson most fully, most
consciously. The value to the cause of peace and good-will in the
community of an army of thousands of educated men and women holding
views such as these cannot easily be over-estimated. The teachers, too,
are often aliens and nearly always of a race different from their
pupils, yet you will rarely meet a teacher who is not delighted with her
charges.
"Do come," they always say, "and see my little Italians, or Irish, or
German, or picaninnies; they are the sweetest little things," or, if
they be teachers of a higher grade, "They are the cleverest and the most
charming children." They are all clever in their different ways, and
they are all charming to those who know them, and the work of the public
school is to make this charm and cleverness appreciated, so that race
misunderstandings in the adult populations may grow fewer and fewer.
The only dissatisfied teacher I ever encountered was a girl of old
Knickerbocker blood, who was considered by her relatives to be too
fragile and refined to teach any children except the darlings of the
upper West side, where some of the rich are democratic enough to
patronize the public school. From what we heard of her experiences,
"patronize" is quite the proper word to use in this connection. A group
of us, classmates, had been comparing notes and asked her from what
country her charges came. "Oh, they are just kids," she answered
dejectedly, "ordinary every-day kids, with Dutch cut hair, Russian
blouses, belts at the knee line, sandals, and nurses to convey them to
and from school. You never saw anything so tiresome."
It grew finally so tiresome that she applied for a transfer, and took
the Knickerbocker spirit down to the Jewish quarter, where it gladdened
the young Jacobs, Rachaels, Isadors and Rebeccas entrusted to her care.
Her place among the nursery pets was taken by a dark-eyed Russian girl,
who found the uptown babies, the despised "just kids," as entertaining,
as lovable, and as instructive as the Knickerbocker girl found the Jews.
Well, and so they are all of them, lovable, entertaining and
instructive, and the man or woman who goes among them with an open heart
and eye will find much material for thought and humility, and one
function of the public school is to promote this understanding and
appreciation. It has done wonders in the past, and every year finds it
better equipped for its work of amalgamation. The making of an American
citizen is its stated function, but its graduates will be citizens not
only of America. In sympathy, at least, they will be citizens of the
world.
FINIS