To the calm observer there is nothing more impressive in society
to-day than the varied and multitudinous associations for the
amelioration of human poverty, ignorance, and crime; and nothing more
depressing than the seeming immense waste of force scattered in these
innumerable directions with results so intangible and undefined. From
all the discussions we hear in the halls of legislation, and on the
popular platform, on the relations of capital and labor, finance, free
trade, land monopoly, taxation, individualism, and socialism, the
rights of women, children, criminals, and animals, one would think
that an entire change must speedily be effected in our theories of
government, religion, and social life, and so there would be if a
small minority, even, honestly believed in these specific reforms. But
alas! our reading minds are yet to be educated into the first
principles of social science; they are yet to learn that our present
theories of life are all false. The old ideas of caste and class, of
rich and poor, educated and uneducated, must pass away, and the many
must no longer suffer that the few may shine. Our religion must teach
the brotherhood of the race, the essential oneness of humanity, and
our government must be based on the broad principles of equal rights
to all. A religion that seeks to make the people satisfied in their
degraded conditions, and releases them from all responsibility for its
continuance, is unworthy our intelligent belief, and a government that
holds half its people in slavery, practically chained where they are
born, in ignorance, poverty, and vice, is unworthy our intelligent
support.
The object of all our specific reforms is to secure equal conditions
for the whole human race. The initiative steps to this end are:--
1. Educate our upper classes, our most intelligent people, into the
belief that our present civilization is based on false principles,
and that the ignorance, poverty, and crime we see about us are the
legitimate results of our false theories.
2. They must be educated to believe that our present conditions and
environments can and will be changed, and that as man is responsible
for the miseries of the race, through his own knowledge and wisdom the
change must come. To-day, men make their God responsible for all human
arrangements, and they quote Scripture to prove that poverty is one of
His wise provisions for the development of all the cardinal virtues. I
heard a sermon preached, not long ago, from the text: "The poor ye
have always with you," in which the preacher dwelt on the virtues of
benevolence and gratitude called out on either side. Poverty, said he,
has been the wise schoolmaster, to teach the people industry, economy,
self-sacrifice, patience, and humility, all those beautiful virtues
that best fit the human soul for the life hereafter. "Blessed are the
poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Thus the lessons
of submission and content have been sedulously taught to oppressed
classes, in the name of God, with fair promises of heaven to come.
The rich must be taught that they have no right to live in luxury
while others starve. The poor must be taught that they, too, have
inalienable rights on this green earth, the right to life, liberty,
and happiness, and to the fruits of their own industry, and it is the
imperative duty of each class to concede the one and demand the other.
The apathy and indifference of the masses in their degraded conditions
are as culpable as the pride and satisfaction of the upper classes in
their superior position.
As the only hope for the lasting progress of the race and a radical
reform in social life lie in the right education of children, their
birth and development is the vital starting-point for the philosopher.
A survey of the various unfortunate classes of society that have
hitherto occupied the time and thought of different orders of
philanthropists, and the little that has been accomplished in our own
lifetime, to go no farther back, gives very little encouragement for
this mere surface work that occupies so many noble men and women in
each generation. In spite of all our asylums and charities, religious
discussion and legislation, the problems of pauperism, intemperance,
and crime are no nearer a satisfactory solution than when our pilgrim
fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, in search of that liberty in thought
and action denied in the old world. The gloomy panorama of misery and
crime moves on, a dark picture in this young civilization.
If we would use the same common sense in the improvement of mankind
that we do in the ordinary affairs of life, we should begin our work
at the foundations of society, in family life, in parenthood, the
source and centre of all these terrible evils whose branches we are
trying to lop off. A family living in an old house, on unhealthy
ground, with water in the cellar, a crumbling foundation, the beams
like sponge, the roof leaking, the chimney full of cracks, would not
spend large sums of money year after year, generation after
generation, in patching up the old house on the same old spot, but
with ordinary wisdom and economy, they would build anew, on higher
ground, with strong foundations, sound timber, substantial chimneys,
and solid roofing. True, they would patch up the old at as little cost
as possible, merely to afford them a shelter until the new home was
built. And all our special reform work to-day is but patching the old,
until with a knowledge of the true laws of social science we can begin
to build the new aright. There is much surface work we must do in
reform, for decency's sake, but all this patching up of ignorant,
diseased, criminal, unfortunate humanity is temporary and transient,
effecting no radical improvement anywhere. The real work that will
tell on all time and the eternities, is building the new life and
character, laying the foundation-stones of future generations in
justice, liberty, purity, peace, and love, the work of the rising
generation of fathers and mothers at this hour. Those of us who have
long since passed the meridian of life, can give you the result of our
experience and researches into social science, but with the young men
and women of this hour rests the hope of the higher civilization which
it is possible for the race to attain through obedience to law. The
lovers of science come back to us from every latitude and longitude,
from their explorations in the mineral, vegetable, and animal
kingdoms, from their observations of the planetary world, bearing the
same message. "All things are governed by law," while man himself who
holds in his own hand the key to all knowledge and power seems never
to be in unison with the grandeur and glory of the world in which he
lives. The picture of struggling humanity through the long past is not
a cheerful one to contemplate. What can be done to mitigate the
miseries of the masses? This thought rests heavily and with increasing
weight on the hearts of all who love justice, liberty, and equality.
The same law of inheritance that hands down the vices of ancestors,
hands down their virtues also, and in a greater ratio, for good is
positive, active, ever vigilant, its worshippers swim up stream
against the current. Could we make all men and women feel their
individual responsibility in the chain of influences that tell on all
time, we could solemnize in our own day such vows for nobler lives as
to make this seeming herculean work light as the wings of angels. If,
henceforward, all the thought, the money, the religious enthusiasm
dedicated to the regeneration of the race, could be devoted to the
generation of our descendants, to the conditions and environments of
parents and children, the whole face of society might be changed
before we celebrate the next centennial of our national life. Science
has vindicated our right to discuss freely whether our ancestors were
apes; let it be as free to ask whether our posterity shall be idiots,
dwarfs, and knaves, and if not, by what change, if any, in our social
institutions, such wretched results may be avoided. Gatton in his work
on "Heredity," says our present civilization is growing too
complicated for our best minds even to grasp, and to meet successfully
the issues of the hour, humanity must be lifted up a few degrees, as
speedily as possible. And where must this radical work begin? The best
hope for the progress of the race in political, religious, and social
life lies in the right birth, education, and development of our
children. Here is the true starting-point for the philosopher.
Let the young man who is indulging in all manner of excesses remember
that in considering the effect of the various forms of dissipation on
himself, his own happiness or danger, he does not begin to measure the
evil of his life. As the high priest at the family altar, his deeds of
darkness will inflict untold suffering on generation after generation.
One of the most difficult lessons to impress on any mind is the power
and extent of individual influence; and parents above all others
resist the belief that their children are exactly what they make
them, no more, no less; like produces like. The origin of ideas was
long a disputed point with different schools of philosophers. Locke
took the ground that the mind of every child born into the world is
like a piece of blank paper; that you may write thereon whatever you
will, but science has long since proved that such idealists as
Descartes were nearer right, that the human family come into the world
with ideas, with marked individual proclivities; that the pre-natal
conditions have more influence than all the education that comes
after. If family peculiarities are transmitted to the third and fourth
generation, the grandson clothed with the same gait, gesture, mode of
thought and expression as the grandfather he has never seen, it is
evident that each individual may reap some advantage and development
from those predecessors whose lives in all matters great and small are
governed by law, by a conscientious sense of duty, not by feeling,
chance, or appetite.
If there is a class of educators who need special preparation
for their high and holy duties, it is those who assume the
responsibilities of parents. Shall they give less thought to immortal
beings than the artist to his landscape or statue.
We wander through the galleries in the old world, and linger before
the works of the great masters, transfixed with the grace and beauty
of the ideals that surround us. And with equal preparation, greater
than these are possible in living, breathing humanity. Go in
imagination from the gallery to the studio of the poor artist, watch
him through the restless days, as he struggles with the conception of
some grand ideal, and then see how patiently he moulds and remoulds
the clay, and when at last, through weary years, the block of marble
is transformed into an angel of light, he worships it, and weeps that
he cannot breathe into it the breath of life. And lo! by his side are
growing up immortal beings to whom he has never given one half the
care and thought bestowed on the silent ones that grace his walls. And
yet the same devotion to a high ideal of human character, would soon
give the world a generation of saints and scholars, of scientists and
statesmen, of glorified humanity such as the world has not yet seen.
Many good people lose heart in trying to improve their surroundings
because they say the influence of one amounts to so little. Remember
it was by the patient toil of generations through centuries that the
Colossus of Rhodes, Diana's Temple at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus, the Pyramids at Egypt, the Pharos at Alexandria, the
Hanging Gardens at Babylon, the Olympian Zeus, the seven wonders of
the world, grew day by day into enduring monuments to the greatness of
humanity. By individual effort the grand result was at last achieved.
So the ideal manhood and womanhood, so earnestly prophesied, will
become living realities in the future. Remember it took three hundred
years to build an Egyptian pyramid. Allowing four generations to a
century we have twelve generations of men who passed their lives in
that one achievement. Was not the work of those who first evened the
ground and laid the foundation-stones as important as of those who
laid the capstones at last? Let us, then, begin in our day by the
discussion of these vital principles of social science, to even the
ground and lay the foundation-stones for the greatest wonder the world
is yet to see,--a man in whom the appetites, the passions, the
emotions are all held in allegiance to their rightful sovereign,
_Reason_. The true words and deeds of successive generations will
build up this glorified humanity, fairer than any Parian marble,
grander than any colossal sculpture of the East, more exalted than
spire or dome, boundless in capacity, in aspiration, limitless as
space.
[Illustration: Amelia B. Edwards (signed "Amelia B. Edwards")]