Granting that the population of Mexico, if freed from this foreign

"busy" idea which the government imported from the north and imposed on

them with such severity in the last forty years, would not immediately

adopt improved methods of cultivation, even when they should have free

opportunity to do so, still we have no reason to conclude that they

would not adopt so much of it as would fit _their_ idea of what a man is

alive for; and if that actually proved good, it would introduce still

further development. So that there would be a natural, and therefore

solid, economic growth which would stick; while a forced development of

it through the devastation of the people is no true growth. The only way

to make it go, is to kill out the Indians altogether, and transport the

"busy" crowd there, and then keep on transporting for several

generations, to fill up the ravages the climate will make on such an

imported population.

The Indian population of our states was in fact dealt with in this

murderous manner. I do not know how grateful the reflection may be to

those who materially profited by its extermination; but no one who looks

forward to the final unification and liberation of man, to the

incorporation of the several goodnesses of the various races in the one

universal race, can ever read those pages of our history without burning

shame and fathomless regret.

I have spoken of the meaning of revolution in general; of the meaning of

the Mexican revolution--chiefly an agrarian one; of its present

condition. I think it should be apparent to you that in spite of the

electoral victory of the now ruling power, it has not put an end even to

the armed rebellion, and cannot, until it proposes some plan of land

restoration; and that it not only has no inward disposition to do, but

probably would not dare to do, in view of the fact that immense capital

financed it into power.

As to what amount of popular sentiment was actually voiced in the

election, it is impossible to say. The dailies informed us that in the

Federal District where there are 1,000,000 voters, the actual vote was

less than 450,000.

They offered no explanation. It is impossible to explain it on the

ground that we explain a light vote in our own communities, that the

people are indifferent to public questions; for the people of Mexico are

not now _indifferent_, whatever else they may be. Two explanations are

possible: the first, and most probable, that of _governmental_

intimidation; the second, that the people are convinced of the

uselessness of voting as a means of settling their troubles. In the less

thickly populated agricultural states, _this is_ very largely the case;

they are relying upon direct revolutionary action. But although there

was guerilla warfare in the Federal District, even before the election,

I find it unlikely that more than half the voting population there

abstained from voting out of conviction, though I should be glad to be

able to believe they did.

However, Madero and his aids are in, as was expected; the question is,

how will they stay in? As Diaz did, and in no other way--if they succeed

in developing Diaz's sometime ability; which so far they are wide from

having done, though they are resorting to the most vindictive and

spiteful tactics in their persecution of the genuine revolutionists,

wherever such come near their clutch.

To this whole turbulent situation three outcomes are possible:

1. A military dictator must arise, with sense enough to make some

substantial concessions, and ability enough to pursue the crushing

policy ably; or

2. The United States must intervene in the interests of American

capitalists and landholders, in case the peasant revolt is not put down

by the Maderist power. And that will be the worst thing that can

possibly happen, and against which every worker in the United States

should protest with all his might; or

3. The Mexican peasantry will be successful, and freedom in land become

an actual fact. And that means the death-knell of great land-holding in

this country also, for what people is going to see its neighbor enjoy so

great a triumph, and sit on tamely itself under landlordism?

Whatever the outcome be, one thing is certain: it is a _great_ movement,

which all the people of the world should be eagerly watching. Yet as I

said at the beginning, the majority of our population know no more about

it than of a revolt on the planet Jupiter. First because they are so,

so, _busy_; they scarcely have time to look over the baseball score and

the wrestling match; how _could_ they read up on a revolution! Second,

they are supremely egotistic and concerned in their own big country with

its big deeds--such as divorce scandals, vice-grafting, and auto races.

Third, they do not read Spanish, and they have an ancient hostility to

all that smells Spanish. Fourth, from our cradles we were told that

whatever happened in Mexico was a joke. Revolutions, or rather

rebellions, came and went, about like April showers, and they never

meant anything serious. And in this indeed there was only too much

truth--it was usually an excuse for one place-hunter to get another

one's scalp. And lastly, as I have said, the majority of our people do

not know that a revolution means a fundamental change in social life,

and not a spectacular display of armies.

It is not much a few can do to remove this mountain of indifference; but

to me it seems that every reformer, of whatever school, should wish to

watch this movement with the most intense interest, as a practical

manifestation of a wakening of the landworkers themselves to the

recognition of what all schools of revolutionary economics admit to be

the primal necessity--the social repossession of the land.

And whether they be victorious or defeated, I, for one, bow my head to

those heroic strugglers, no matter how ignorant they are, who have

raised the cry Land and Liberty, and planted the blood-red banner on the

burning soil of Mexico.

Thomas Paine

To speak of Thomas Paine is to mention in one breath daring tempered by

judgment, courage both mental and physical, foresight and prudence

coupled with unstinted generosity, patience and endurance for the long

race, constancy to the unwon ideal, that superior power over men,

conferred by no extrinsic dictum, typified best perhaps by the

loadstone, which always bursts forth in times of revolution from the

unexpected place, the unbought and the unsought glory of the man who is

a hero because a hero is required and does not measure his services nor

reckon on their reward; not that he underrates himself; (it is as

impossible as it is undesirable that a powerful personality should not

know itself as such) but simply that in the moment of decisions the

value of self is abandoned. So far as any or all of these qualities are

concerned Thomas Paine is a name for them all, in their highest

expression. And one feels in approaching him that there is something

like treason in paying him any but a perfect tribute. Yet such is the

position into which I am forced,--to say less than I should, less than I

would had not words and the art of using them almost failed me.

I do not like lecturers who come before the public with apologies, nor

do I propose to make any; I simply say this to let you know that I shall

feel, perhaps more keenly than any of you, my failure to do Paine

justice. For the half century that his history has been being unmined

from the cellar of calumny and filth that the orthodox had cast upon it,

unmined chiefly by small groups of freethinkers scattered here and there

and spreading his words among men, like the little foxes with the

firebrands going in among the corn, the principal endeavor has been to

establish Paine's reputation as a great reformer in religion. And such

he undoubtedly was. Whoever reads his "Age of Reason" in anything but a

spirit of predisposition against it, must feel this, however much he may

disagree with Paine's criticism, or consider that he has come short in

his constructive philosophy. And it is meet, too, that the book that

cost him most, both before and after death, should be the one selected

for defense. Nevertheless the effect has been rather to lose sight of

what appear to me greater thoughts and acts. For just as the orthodox

have forgotten, so have many freethinkers forgotten, his immense labors

in the field of active struggle against the domination of man by man. It

is true that his mind did not transcend the mental vesture of the time,

and it was all the better in one of his marvelous capacities for

_swinging_ masses of men that it did not. The lonely heralds of the

opening dawn go upon their paths solitary; no matter how much they

desire to draw others with them, they cannot. And had Paine been one of

these that break through the forms of thought such as was Copernicus, or

Kant, or Darwin, he would have been at constant war with himself. Half

his nature would have chosen the lonely path; the other half, the

zealot, the propagandist, would have cried out, they _must_ go with me;

I must do something to make them _go with_ me. Now the secret of Paine's

success was that he was so thoroughly at one with himself, he believed

so utterly what he preached, he had faith, he hoped, and so strongly

that others were drawn to believe and to hope. For spite of all

intellectual pride this is the man whom we love and admire; this is the

man who overcomes us, who gets his way; this man consistent in himself,

who has a remedy for the world's wrongs and hopes _everything_ from it!

From the point of vantage of 100 years' experience it is seen that

Paine's political creed, like his religious one, will no longer fit. But

that does not matter. Neither will ours fit in a hundred years, and none

of us, no, not one, is great enough to foresee where the misfit will

arise. It is not our business to bear the evils of the thrice unborn

upon our necks; nor was it Paine's to bear ours.

Yet while not claiming for him the prophetic gift, it is still true that

he did see the moral patchwork in our constitution, the trouble of 1812

brewing, and the greater trouble of '61-'65.

When he first came to this country he wrote a number of contributions to

the _Pennsylvania Magazine_, in one of which he pleaded justice for the

negro, basing his plea then as always upon the natural equality of man

irrespective of color. Afterwards when the constitution was framed, he

objected that nothing had been done for the negro, and in his letters to

the American people, written after his imprisonment in France, in which

the constitution was caustically reviewed, he cries out again for this

yoked man not yet to be freed for more than half a hundred

years,--foreseeing that nothing good can in the end come from slavery,

that every evil must bring a compensating evil. The soldiers' graves in

the National cemeteries, the thousands of limping, haggard tatters and

rags of white men attest how well Paine foresaw Time's revenges.

In the letter to Washington, partially unjust as it is in view of the

fact that Gouverneur Morris and not Washington was responsible for the

failure to save Paine from prison in France, as we now know, thanks to

Moncure Conway, but which Paine did _not_ know,--in this letter, I

say, will be found the most terrible arraignment of the constitution

ever penned. We who are Anarchists are called traitors for much calmer

talk. Yet here was the man "whose pen had done more for the revolution

than Washington's sword," as his bitterest enemy declared; who believed

heart and soul in the republic, who had given his money and his

substance and taken the chances of his life in battle for it; the man

whose devotion to America could not be gainsaid; this man declared

that the American constitution was the mirror of the most vicious

features of the British constitution, a fecund soil for monopolies

with all their ills. It is we who experience those ills, we who know

what a gigantic tool of oppression the constitution and the cumbersome

machinery of the lawmaking power have become. Yet probably even we do

not feel so keenly as he the fatal blunder; for while we know how it

grinds us in our flesh and souls, rears its prisons and scaffolds for

us, we have had the yoke about our necks always,--while he _had once

seen_ the country free. He had been through all the battle, had fought

his fight and won his victory, only to see it lost through cowardice

of thought. That was indeed bitter; and it is that bitter outcry

against this sacrifice which marks Paine out among most of his time for

influence on future history. The fact that he was the initiator of the

direct movement for political independence in America, in the famous

meeting where Adams, Franklin and Washington all shrank from uttering

the thought heavy upon their souls, is a matter of past history. The

fact that he was the one man in America to write the right thing at

the right time, his voice the wind to sweep the scattering flames

of insubordination and revolt into the conflagration of revolution;

the fact that he proposed and headed with the whole contents of his

purse the subscription to save the army when even Washington was in

despair at the prospect of mutiny and desertion among the soldiers;

the fact that he raised all the feeling possible against the fiction

of divine rights and so got himself hunted out of England; the fact

that he took the most active part possible in aiding the work of the

French revolutionists, which he believed would be the beginning of the

breakdown of monarchy throughout Europe and the building up either

of one universal continental republic or a confederation of sister

republics; the fact that he was the one man in the convention who

dared to stand for the life of Louis the XVI, and thereby got himself

suspected, thrown into prison, and condemned to death--all these facts

are of import in reading the character of the man, and in comprehending

the record of those days when they were making history fast. Yet none

of these has so much influence upon the demands of to-day as the voice

of discontent crying for eternal vigilance, which sounds through these

almost unknown letters. These are the things which it will pay to

reprint in the day when American liberty feels in its tomb the first

stirrings of the resurrection. Did we like Paine believe in God, we

might say "Pray God it may not be far away."

Such are the characters whose historic influence is greatest; they who

hew, and hew hard to the line laid down for them by the events of their

time; yet are not blinded by the stir and roll of things; who see

clearly where the deflection from the line is likely to occur, and where

it will lead; who raise the warning treble that goes shrilling to the

future, startling, waking with its eerie cry custom-dulled ears, and

sodden souls, who start to ask, was it not a ghost of the Revolution? In

that day which may not be so distant as we fear, Paine will be more

alive than ever; he will be watching at a million firesides with the old

keen, strong eyes.

While I have deprecated the fact that the religious reformer has been

exalted to the neglect of the political one, I cannot omit that part of

his life-work so well-known to all, yet never old. The "Age of Reason"

has long been both exaggerated and despised as an iconoclastic work. But

we are indebted to Conway, the greatest of Paine students, who out of

the many biographies he has written has chosen that of Paine to be the

master-piece of his life (and it is a work which any author might be

proud to regard his master-piece), to him I say we are indebted for a

different view of the "Age of Reason."

I know not whether Mr. Conway's own Unitarian bias may not have

influenced him; it is possible. It is possible that his eager search for

positivism may have unconsciously determined his attitude towards the

great hero, and modified his interpretation of Paine's words. I believe

it has; because I believe _that_ is inevitable. I believe we read our

own ideals into other people, and must do so if we think at all. But

making all allowance for the biographer's prejudgment, Conway has still

a magnificent argument for putting Paine in the defendant's position. We

are no longer to view the book as an attack upon religion but as its

defense,--the defense of what is beneficial, permanent, necessary, in

the religious element of human nature against the scribes and pharisees

on the one hand and the philistines on the other. It was the plea for

the redemption of the edifice from the dirt and cobwebs, the protest

against smashing the stones to kill the spiders. The great prerequisite

to the understanding of the "Age of Reason" is an acquaintance with the

literature of that time--especially French literature. The pamphlets,

periodicals, and books are the crystals wherein _the Zeitgeist_ of the

18th century is preserved. Without this acquaintance we cannot realize

how the people continually thought, and what was new and what was old,

what was acceptable and what unacceptable to them. And we shall find by

it that the fashion of sneering popularized by Voltaire, and so

admirably embodied by the _finesse_ of the French language (always a

language of double meanings and hemi-demi-semi-shaded insinuations), the

still more reprehensible habit of deducing immense generals from very

scanty particulars, or in fact contriving the generals first and then

fitting in or suavely waiving the particulars altogether, had so

permeated not only French philosophy, but the heads of the common people

as well, that religion had become almost a byword, a baseless

superstition unaccounted for by, and unnecessary according to, the

all-accepted theory of Natural Law. To defend it, to maintain that there

was something else in it, was equivalent to pleading for the life of the

King before the convention! That was to maintain that there were claims

of the human--after the King had been stripped; this was to say that

underneath the gewgaws and tinsel of religions the undying heart of man,

the man of all the past, had been expressing its noblest aspirations.

And Paine stripped off the tinsel and said, "Put your hand here,--it

beats"; and because he tore the tinsel, the orthodox would have stoned

him; and because he said "it beats," the philosophers would have whetted

the knife. And between the two he stood firm, proclaiming what he

believed, not counting the cost. We may not believe as he; most of us do

not. But that is the man we love: who has something in him superior to

the judgments of men; who holds steadfast--steadfast even in

persecution, even to death.

Perhaps there is no more pathetic thing than the last years, the death,

and the burial of Paine. The world would have been poorer had he died

sooner; but to him, to the man, the gun-shot or the guillotine had been

kinder than the unhappy life rejected by the nation he had given all to

free, shunned by political cowards and persecuted by religious

bigots,--even on his death-bed. But though so lonely, so pathetically

lonely, there is something that sends a fine, cold thrill along the

nerves in that strange procession and burial--that poor procession, that

procession of the Hicksite Quaker, the two negroes, the widowed

Frenchwoman and her son. I wonder what sort of day it was; whether the

sun shone or the clouds lowered over the solitary grave on the little

farm, when Margaret Bonneville said to her child, "Stand you there at

his feet, for France; and I will here, for America." I do not know where

the negroes and the Hicksite stood when that august corpse was lowered

to the depths, but there, close, somewhere, stood the unfreed race, for

whom he had vainly plead, and there, close, somewhere, the soul's revolt

at spiritual masters. And from that tomb there went away the scattering

fires, of the risen ghost, the '61 living Paine, the Grand Reality.

Dyer D. Lum

(February 15, 1839--April 6, 1893)

One of the silent martyrs whose graves are trodden to the level by their

fellows' feet, almost before it is seen that they have fallen, completed

his martyrdom one year ago to-night.

There are thousands of such, why then commemorate this one?

Let our answer be that in this one we commemorate all the others, and if

we have chosen his day and name, it is because his genius, his work, his

character was one of those rare gems produced in the great mine of

suffering and flashing backward with all its changing lights the hopes,

the fears, the gaieties, the griefs, the dreams, the doubts, the loves,

the hates, the sum of that which is buried, low down there, in the human

mine.

No more modest a man than Dyer D. Lum ever lived; partly, nay mostly,

indeed, it was inborn, instinctive; but it was also fostered by his

conception of life, which led him to consider self as the veriest of

soap-bubbles, a thing to be dispelled by the merest whiff of wind, so to

speak; and therefore, personal recognition or personal gain as the most

silly, as well as unworthy, of motives. For this reason his works have

often gone where his name did not, and thousands of persons have been

influenced by his logic and his sentiments who never heard of his

personality. Indeed there were some of us who wondered when he died,

what certain labor leaders would henceforth do for a cheap scribe to

furnish them brains.

I have often heard him quote as his motto, both for organization and for

literary effort, the expressive sentence: "_Get in your work._" "Let

fools take the credit if they want it," was the implication of his tone,

and I shall never forget the delightful smile with which he repeated

Charles Mackay's lines, most singularly transposing the author's

meaning: "Grub little moles----." He took an especial pleasure in

grubbing, and smiling when a streak of sunlight fell on some one else.

I have said that this distinguishing characteristic, so fruitful in

results in his later life, was partly instinctive and partly a

philosophic conviction. The instinctive side may be best understood by a

brief sketch of his ancestry. It is generally complained that the

troublesome people who are never satisfied to let society alone, must

necessarily be foreigners; at least they can never belong to the same

nation as we, the good, the respectable. The easy method of laying

everything pestilent to the charge of the foreigner, will not serve a

conservative American against Dyer D. Lum. The first of the Lums to set

foot in this country was Samuel L., a Scotchman, in the year 1732. They

rooted in New England soil, and at the time of the Revolution, Dyer's

great grandfather was a minute-man in the very town, Northampton, where

his own corpse was laid a year ago. On the maternal side the Tappan

family were also revolutionists, and back of revolutionists

Reformationists in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and still back of that,

Crusaders. All this would be important enough and indeed even

distinguishing, were I relating it by way of "gilding refined gold"; but

they acquire meaning the moment we regard them as data for a character.

They are fraught with mysterious symbolism, and he himself becomes a

symbol of the deep-rooted faith of humanity, when we see that

subterranean stream of blood running from Jerusalem through Europe and

across the sea to America. It shows how profound is the well-spring of

devotion to cause in the human heart; through how many centuries the

spirit of rebellion lives. But what, say you, had it to do with his

instinctive modesty? This: _the devotee of a cause is never the devotee

of self_.

Now as to his philosophic convictions, it would be easy to deliver a

whole lecture upon them; and unfortunately his profoundest work on that

subject has not yet been printed. Of course, I can present them but

briefly. I must preface that, as you will no doubt observe later on, his

beliefs were in his own case a plain testimony to their own correctness.

It sounds ridiculous to say that a thing can prove itself; but you will

understand me when I explain that he regarded the conscious life of man,

which includes, of course, his processes of reasoning and therefore his

philosophy, as the merest fragment of him; that this process itself,

which we are wont so fondly to consider as setting us higher than the

brute, is but an upgrowth of our instincts. Man, the race Man,

psychologically as well as bodily, might be likened to a tree, which

every year adds small new growths whose bright green verdure opens to

the sunlight, while below and supporting them quivers the great dark

green mass of the tree, which year after year repeats itself, whispering

in its shadows the old whispers of the centuries. The new verdure would

represent the conscious life and growth of individuals, budding upward

in response to the conditions surrounding them and adding what tiny mite

they may to the experience of the race; but beneath and through, and all

about them rustle the traditions of the dead--dead as individuals, but

living, more potently living than ever, in the great trunk and branches

of unconscious, or instinctive life. And as the shape of the newly

budding leaf, the shade of its green, the length of its stem, its size,

are determined more by the nature of the tree than by surrounding

circumstances, so the philosophy of the individual is determined by the

instinctive life of the race.

The winter of death comes; the individual withers like the leaf; but the

small item of growth that he has added is there, brown and barren though

the twig appear. From him new buds will shoot, though its own leaves

hereafter rustle in the deep green shadows of unconsciousness. As time

passes away useless boughs wither and die, and are stricken utterly from

the life of the race; such are the worthless lives, the abnormal

growths, which no longer add anything either to the beauty or the

service of the whole.

Or, to adopt one of Comrade Lum's own figures, the useless or brutish

elements in man slowly sink down like sediment deposited by the moving

current. Now, in a case where we are able to trace a strain of blood as

far back as this of his, and further are able to look at the conscious

work of the man, and see that the one was the offspring of the other,

modified of course by circumstances, we are able to make the seemingly

absurd statement that the belief proves its own correctness.

Let me particularize concerning this belief. First he was in all his

writings the advocate of resistance, the champion of rebellion. But long

before he had reduced the matter to a syllogism, he was a resistant in

fact. What else could you expect from the Crusader, the Reformationist,

the Revolutionist? It might be said by the people who believe in the

supreme influence of circumstances, that it was his social environment

which made him such--that given the ideal social order and he would

have been as mild a pacificator as Jesus: which is equivalent to saying

that given the outward circumstances and an ear of wheat will grow from

a seed corn.

Lum was the resistant, the man of action; the man who while scarcely

more than a boy, enlisted as a volunteer in the 125th New York infantry

to fight a cause he then deemed just; who being taken prisoner, twice

effected his escape; who sick of the inaction of superiors, while a

third-time prisoner waiting to be exchanged, took his exchange in his

own hands, at the risk of death for desertion, and within a month

re-enlisted in the cavalry, where by sheer force of daring he rose from

private to captain; the man who smashed the idol of the Greenback

movement, sooner than let him betray its voters, reckless himself of the

rebound of hate from the politicians; the man who cast all business

prospects and journalistic hopes aside as so much chaff, when he picked

up the fallen banner of the fight in Chicago, by editing the paper of

Albert Parsons, then in prison and doomed to die; the man who could say

to his well-beloved friend, when that friend asked him whether he should

petition Governor Oglesby for his life, knowing that that petition would

be granted, the man who, under these circumstances could say: "Die,

Parsons"; the man who poor, defeated, dirty, ragged, hungry, could

proudly refuse the proffered hand of the then king of the labor

movement, that king who had kept his kingdom by repudiating the martyrs

of Chicago from the limitless height of one soul over another, answer

"there's blood on it, Powderly"; the man who faced a public audience to

defend the shooting of Frick by Alexander Berkman, a few days after the

occurrence, because he felt that when another has done a thing which you

approve as leading in the direction of your own aspirations, it is your

duty to share the effects of the counterblast his action may have

provoked; the man who seized the unknown Monster, Death, with a smile on

his lips--all of this man was germinating in the child of the pious home

who even when a mere boy had dared Jehovah.

Having "weighed Him, tried Him, found Him naught," he threw the Jewish

God and cosmogony overboard with as much equanimity as he would have

eaten his dinner, and set about finding a more reasonable explanation of

phenomena. In this, as in all other matters, the man of action has a

certain advantage over a pure theorist, which is this: he plunges

immediately into the conflict, he throws the gauntlet, rashly sometimes,

but boldly; he settles the question at once; if there is any suffering

attached to the attempt, he suffers once and has done with it; while the

theorist, the fellow who walks tiptoe round the edge of the

battle-field, dies a hundred times and still suffers on.

My own conversion from orthodoxy to freethought was of this latter sort.

I never dared God; I always tried to propitiate him with prayers and

tears even while I was doubting his existence; I suffered hell a

thousand times while I was wondering where it was located. But my

teacher winked at the heavens, braved hell, and then tossed the whole

affair aside with a joke.

Nevertheless, he did not, as nearly all of our modern image-breakers

have done, deny all religions in their entirety, because he had run a

lance through a stuffed Mumbo-Jumbo. Indeed, the spirit of devotion to

something greater than Self, which will be found as the kernel of every

religion, was so thoroughly in him, or indeed _was_ he himself that

whether he fancied himself _willing_ it or not, his inclinations

directed all his conscious efforts to read the riddle of life into the

channel of Buddhism. I do not know whether he ever accepted its

peculiarly fanciful side or not; but if he did, it was early corrected

by a no less characteristic trait, also an inheritance of the Tappan

family, that of critical analysis. An omnivorous reader, he was always

abreast of the times in matters of scientific discovery; and his

inexorable logic would never have permitted him to retain a creed which

necessitated any doctoring of facts; he rather doctored the creed to fit

the facts and thus evolved a species of modern Buddhism which he called

"Evolutional Ethics," whose principles may be briefly stated as follows:

Man is the continuation of the process of evolution up to date. He is

thus united to all other products of evolution, and is governed by the

same laws. The two factors which determine form in the organic world are

_adaptation_ and _inheritance_; and since evolution is no less a matter

of psychology than physiology, the soul of man as well as the soul of

animals and plants, must be moulded by these factors. That inheritance

tends to crystallize existing forms, while _adaptation_, or the

influence of environment, ever tends to modification of forms, whether

physical or intellectual. That mind as much as body is unconscious, so

far as there is perfect adaptation to surroundings; and that only when

inharmony of the organism with the environment as the result of change

in the latter, arises, can there be _consciousness_. That this

consciousness is a state of pain, more or less sharply defined; and will

continue to increase in intensity until the necessary adaptation is

accomplished, when _as a result_ a feeling of satisfaction or pleasure

will ensue, gradually sinking into the blissful unconsciousness of

perfect harmony. That progress thus demands this stepping constantly up

the rough stairway of pain; and that not even one step is passed until

moistened by the blood of many generations. That the path up the

mountain side is not laid out _by_ us, but _for_ us, and that we _must_

travel there whether it pleases us or not. That the chances are it will

_not_ please us; that our whole lives, in so far as they are conscious,

will probably be one record of never achieved struggle; and that rest

will come only when we descend to the unconsciousness of Death.

Thus he was a pessimist of the darkest hue; and yet he never wasted a

moment's regret on the facts. He watched this passing spectre man,

gliding among the whirling dance of atoms, contemplated his final

extinction with composure, sneered at metaphysicians while he himself

was buried in metaphysics, and cracked jokes either at his own expense

or somebody else's.

The result of all this speculation was the conclusion that man, being a

social animal, must adapt himself to social ends (not determined by him

but for him--unconsciously); that therefore the one who sets himself and

his egotistic desires against the social ideal is the supreme traitor.

He had a peculiar power of expressing volumes in an epithet; and the

epithet he gave to the Egoist was "Dung-Beetle." For the sake of those

who may not be familiar with the insect referred to, I may explain that

a dung-beetle is a sort of bug that exhibits its instincts by rolling a

ball of dung, and who sometimes appears to meditate when he rolls over

the ball that the universe has turned bottom up--because he has.

Now, it is well known that the greater part of the reform

camp--particularly the Anarchistic camp--is made up of Dung-Beetles, I

mean of Egoists; people who declare that the desire for pleasure is the

motive of action, who think a great deal of their egos and don't care a

rap for society. The result was they sharpened their pencils and wrote

scathing editorials denouncing him. To which he answered never a word.

First, because he didn't consider himself worth fighting about; and

second, if he had, he was altogether too good a general to do it. His

opponents were a disputatious sort, who liked nothing better than

argument; he knew what his enemy wanted and _didn't do it_.

But when a question worth discussing arose, then woe to those who had

courted the rapier of his wit, or challenged to duel with the

diamond-tipped dagger of his sarcasm. He could answer columns with a

paragraph.

I do not know whether this philosophy of his had crystallized in his own

mind before he became an Anarchist or not. I believe, however, it had

not; I think it grew along with his other conceptions, being broadened

and corrected, and in turn broadening and correcting his thought in

other channels. But at any rate, fully developed or not, it certainly

influenced his conclusions on economic subjects greatly. True to his

instincts he was always at the front of battle, and when the war closed

his first move was to attach himself to the Greenback party, the first

widespread expression of organized protest against monopoly of the means

of production in America. He still had faith in the saving grace of

politics, and was active enough in the agitation to be nominated for

Lieut. Governor of Massachusetts with Wendell Phillips for Governor. The

fight, which besides being a demand for fiat money, embodied a

short-hour movement, took on a national character; and Dyer D. Lum with

five others, including Albert R. Parsons, was appointed on a committee

to push the matter before Congress. This was in 1880. Six years later,

time and the tide had driven both of them into the great current of

Socialism, and final repudiation of politics as a means of attaining

Socialistic ideals. And here came in the philosophy of the unconscious.

The socialization of industry was the next step up the mountain side,

not because men wished or planned it; but the pressure of surroundings

made it the only possible move; but on the other hand the reactionary,

system-building Socialism advocated by the great master Marx, and all

his train of little repeaters, was seen to be at variance with a no less

marked feature of the evolving social ideal, viz., elasticity, mobility,

constantly increasing differentiation; which is only possible when units

of society are left free to adapt themselves to the slightest changes,

unforced by the opinions of other people who know nothing of the matters

in question, but who, being in the majority (for where is ignorance not

in the majority?) could suppress the free movements of the minority by

enacting their ignorance into laws.

Thus it will be seen that he looked forward to free Socialism as the

industrial ideal; the requirements of that ideal are laid down in his

"Economics of Anarchy."

A few of his caustic sentences may here be quoted:

"The Statist assumes that rights increase in some metaphysical manner,

and become incarnate in half the whole plus one."

"Politics discovers wisdom by taking a general poll of ignorance."

"Every appeal to legislation to do aught but _undo_ is as futile as

sending a flag of truce to the enemy for munitions of war."

"When Caesar conquered Greece, he subjugated Olympus, and the Gods now

measure tape behind counters with Christian decorum."

Lum had faith in humankind. He always trusted the people; the people

that maligned him, the people that injured him, the people that killed

him. When I asked him once why he did not get angry at an individual who

industriously circulated lies about him, he answered with a twinkling

laugh, "For the same reason that I don't kick the house-cat." And yet he

had an abiding faith in that man, and other similar men, to work out the

judgments of the human race, undisturbed by the fact that they let their

only honest leaders die in garrets.

And underneath the speculative philosopher who confused you with long

words; underneath the cold logician who mercilessly scouted at

sentiment; underneath the pessimistic poet that sent the mournful cry of

the whip-poor-will echoing through the widowed chambers of the heart,

that hung and sung over the festival walls of Life the wreaths and

dirges of Death; underneath the gay joker who delighted to play tricks

on politicians, police and detectives; was the man who took the children

on his knees and told them stories while the night was falling, the man

who gave up a share of his own meagre meals to save five blind kittens

from drowning; the man who lent his arm to a drunken washerwoman whom he

did not know, and carried her basket for her, that she might not be

arrested and locked up; the man who gathered four-leafed clovers and

sent them to his friends, wishing them "all the luck which superstition

attached to them"; the man whose heart was beating with the great common

heart, who was one with the simplest and the poorest.

Lum held that evolutional ethics, or Anarchist ethics, in fact, must

take account of both the altruistic and egoistic impulses; that while

determining causes will ever lie in the mysterious realm of the

unconscious life, consciousness may discern the trend of development

and throw in its quota of influence for or against. That in its

endeavor to comprehend the trend of development, it should take fair

account of ancient truths, however enveloped in superstitious husks;

should aim to extract the virtue even in the much mistaken altruistic

doctrines of vicarious atonement and personal abasement; and while

emphasizing the negation of human rulership as destructive of the

possibilities of true growth, at the same time to acknowledge the vain

conceit of self as anything more than a temporary grouping of instinct

developed in beast, in plant, in man; to acknowledge the individual

creature as a sort of mirrored reflection of the cosmos, constantly

shifting, now scintillant, now vague and evanescent, now gone forever as

Death breaks the mirror.

The notion of immortality which grows from such a conception of self is

purged of the old vain conceit. It has been most beautifully voiced in

George Eliot's "Choir Invisible," Mr. Lum's favorite poem; and in the

lines is expressed the last great limitless shadow which engulfs even

this immortality, the blind, tremendous darkness which lies at the end

of all, the sense of the invincibility of which must have lain upon our

teacher's soul when after the last searching, inexplicable, farewell

look into a friend's eyes he went out into the April night and took his

last walk in the roar of the great city--he who should soon be so

silent!

Most of his comrades were surprised. They said: "I never thought Dyer D.

Lum would go alone." But I who know how often and how wearily he said

"What's the use," am sure that that mocking question lay at his heart,

and paralyzed the _will_ to do.

Like Olive Schreiner's stars in the African Farm, the soul about to

depart sees the earth so coldly--all the ages are as one night--and

like them he watches little helpless creatures of the earth come out and

crawl awhile upon its skin, then go back beneath it, and it does not

matter--nothing matters.

Francisco Ferrer

In all unsuccessful social upheavals there are two terrors: the

Red--that is, the people, the mob; the White--that is, the reprisal.

When a year ago to-day the lightning of the White Terror shot out of

that netherest blackness of Social Depth, the Spanish Torture House, and

laid in the ditch of Montjuich a human being who but a moment before had

been the personification of manhood, in the flower of life, in the

strength and pride of a balanced intellect, full of the purpose of a

great and growing undertaking,--that of the Modern Schools,--humanity at

large received a blow in the face which it could not understand.

Stunned, bewildered, shocked, it recoiled and stood gaping with

astonishment. How to explain it? The average individual--certainly the

average individual in America--could not believe it possible that any

group of persons calling themselves a government, let it be of the worst

and most despotic, could slay a man for being a teacher, a teacher of

modern sciences, a builder of hygienic schools, a publisher of

text-books. No: they could not believe it. Their minds staggered back

and shook refusal. It was not so; it could not be so. The man was

shot,--that was sure. He was dead, and there was no raising him out of

the ditch to question him. The Spanish government had certainly

proceeded in an unjustifiable manner in court-martialing him and

sentencing him without giving him a chance at defense. But surely he

had been guilty of something; surely he must have rioted, or instigated

riot, or done some desperate act of rebellion; for never could it be

that in the twentieth century a country of Europe could kill a peaceful

man whose aim in life was to educate children in geography, arithmetic,

geology, physics, chemistry, singing, and languages.

No: it was not possible!--And, for all that, it was possible; it was

done, on the 13th of October, one year ago to-day, in the face of

Europe, standing with tied hands to look on at the murder.

And from that day on, controversy between the awakened who understood,

the reactionists who likewise understood, and their followers on both

sides who have half understood, has surged up and down and left

confusion pretty badly confounded in the mind of him who did not

understand, but sought to.

The men who did him to death, and the institutions they represent have

done all in their power to create the impression that Ferrer was a

believer in violence, a teacher of the principles of violence, a doer of

acts of violence, and an instigator of widespread violence perpetrated

by a mass of people. In support of the first they have published reports

purporting to be his own writings, have pretended to reproduce seditious

pictures from the walls of his class-rooms, have declared that he was

seen mingling with the rebels during the Catalonian uprising of last

year, and that upon trial he was found guilty of having conceived and

launched the Spanish rebellion against the Moroccan war. And that his

death was a just act of reprisal.

On the other hand, we have had a storm of indignant voices clamoring in

his defense, alternately admitting and denying him to be a

revolutionist, alternately contending that his schools taught social

rebellion and that they taught nothing but pure science; we have had

workmen demonstrating and professors and litterateurs protesting on very

opposite grounds; and almost none were able to give definite information

for the faith that was in them.

And indeed it has been very difficult to obtain exact information, and

still is so. After a year's lapse, it is yet not easy to get the facts

disentangled from the fancies,--the truths from the lies, and above all

from the half-lies.

And even when we have the truths as to the facts, it is still difficult

to valuate them, because of American ignorance of Spanish ignorance.

Please understand the phrase. America has not too much to boast of in

the way of its learning; but yet it has that much of common knowledge

and common education that it does not enter into our minds to conceive

of a population 68% of which are unable to read and write, and a good

share of the remaining 32% can only read, not write; neither does it at

all enter our heads to think that of this 32% of the better informed,

the most powerful contingent is composed of those whose distinct,

avowed, and deliberate purpose it is to keep the ignorant ignorant.

Whatever may be the sins of Government in this country, or of the

Churches--and there are plenty of such sins--at least they have not

(save in the case of negro slaves) constituted themselves a

conspiratical force to keep out enlightenment,--to prevent the people

from learning to read and write, or to acquire whatever scientific

knowledge their economic circumstances permitted them to. What the

unconscious conspiracy of economic circumstance has done, and what

conscious manipulations the Government school is guilty of, to render

higher education a privilege of the rich and a maintainer of injustice

is another matter. But it cannot be charged that the rulers of America

seek to render the people illiterate. People, therefore, who have grown

up in a general atmosphere of thought which regards the government as a

provider of education, even as a compeller of education, do not, unless

their attention is drawn to the facts, conceive of a state of society in

which government is a hostile force, opposed to the enlightenment of the

people,--its politicians exercising all their ingenuity to sidetrack the

demand of the people for schools. How much less do they conceive the

hostile force and power of a Church, having behind it an unbroken

descent from feudal ages, whose direct interest it is to maintain a

closed monopoly of learning, and to keep out of general circulation all

scientific information which would tend to destroy the superstitions

whereby it thrives.

I say that the American people in general are not informed as to these

conditions, and therefore the phenomenon of a teacher killed for

instituting and maintaining schools staggers their belief. And when they

read the assertions of those who defend the murder, that it was because

his schools were instigating the overthrow of social order in Spain,

they naturally exclaim: "Ah, that explains it! The man taught sedition,

rebellion, riot, in his schools! That is the reason."

Now the truth is, that what Ferrer was teaching in his schools was

really instigating the overthrow of the social order of Spain;

furthermore it was not only instigating it, but it was making it as

certain as the still coming of the daylight out of the night of the

east. But not by the teaching of riot; of the use of dagger, bomb, or

knife; but by the teaching of the same sciences which are taught in our

public schools, through a generally diffused knowledge of which the

power of Spain's despotic Church must crumble away. Likewise it was

laying the primary foundation for the overthrow of such portions of the

State organization as exist by reason of the general ignorance of the

people.

The Social Order of Spain ought to be overthrown; must be overthrown,

will be overthrown; and Ferrer was doing a mighty work in that

direction. The men who killed him knew and understood it well. And they

consciously killed him for what he really did; but they have let the

outside world suppose they did it, for what he did not do. Knowing there

are no words so hated by all governments as "sedition and rebellion,"

knowing that such words will make the most radical of governments align

itself with the most despotic at once, knowing there is nothing which so

offends the majority of conservative and peace-loving people everywhere

as the idea of violence unordered by authority, they have wilfully

created the impression that Ferrer's schools were places where children

and youths were taught to handle weapons, and to make ready for armed

attacks on the government.

They have, as I said before, created this impression in various ways;

they have pointed to the fact that the man who in 1906 made the attack

on Alfonso's life, had acted as a translator of books used by Ferrer in

his schools; they have scattered over Europe and America pictures

purporting to be reproductions of drawings in prominent wall-spaces in

his schools, recommending the violent overthrow of the government.

As to the first of these accusations, I shall consider it later in the

lecture; but as to the last, it should be enough to remind any person

with an ordinary amount of reflection, that the schools were public

places open to any one, as our schools are; and that if any such

pictures had existed, they would have been sufficient cause for

shutting up the schools and incarcerating the founder within a day

after their appearance on the walls. The Spanish Government has that

much sense of how to preserve its own existence, that it would not allow

such pictures to hang in a public place for one day. Nor would books

preaching sedition have been permitted to be published or

circulated.--All this is foolish dust sought to be thrown in foolish

eyes.

No; the real offense was the real thing that he did. And in order to

appreciate its enormity, from the Spanish ruling force's standpoint, let

us now consider what that ruling force is, what are the economic and

educational conditions of the Spanish people, why and how Ferrer founded

the Modern Schools, and what were the subjects taught therein.

Up to the year 1857 there existed no legal provision for general

elementary education in Spain. In that year, owing to the liberals

having gotten into power in Madrid, after a bitter contest aroused

partially by the general political events of Europe, a law making

elementary education compulsory was passed. This was two years before

Ferrer's birth.

Now it is one thing for a political party, temporarily in possession of

power, to pass a law. It is quite another thing to make that law

effective, even when wealth and general sentiment are behind it. But

when joined to the fact that there is a strong opposition is added the

fact that this opposition is in possession of the greatest wealth of the

country, that the people to be benefited are often quite as bitterly

opposed to their own enlightenment as those who profit by their

ignorance, and that those who do ardently desire their own uplift are

extremely poor, the difficulty of practicalizing this educational law is

partially appreciated.

Ferrer's own boyhood life is an illustration of how much benefit the

children of the peasantry reaped from the educational law. His parents

were vine dressers; they were eminently orthodox and believed what their

priest (who was probably the only man in the little village of Alella

able to read) told them: that the Liberals were the emissaries of Satan

and that whatever they did was utterly evil. They wanted no such evil

thing as popular education about, and would not that their children

should have it. Accordingly, even at 13 years of age, the boy was

without education,--a circumstance which in after years made him more

anxious that others should not suffer as he had.

It is self-understood that if it was difficult to found schools in the

cities where there existed a degree of popular clamor for them, it was

next to impossible in the rural districts where people like Ferrer's

parents were the typical inhabitants. The best result obtained by this

law in the 20 years from 1857 to 1877 was that, out of 16,000,000

people, 4,000,000 were then able to read and write,--75% remaining

illiterate. At the end of 1907 the proportion was altered to 6,000,000

literate out of 18,500,000 population, which may be considered as a

fairly correct approximate of the present condition.

One of the very great accounting causes for this situation is the

extreme poverty of the mass of the populace. In many districts of Spain

a laborer's wages are less than $1.00 a week, and nowhere do they equal

the poorest workman's wages in America. Of course, it is understood that

the cost of living is likewise low; but imagine it as low as you please,

it is still evident that the income of the workers is too small to

permit them to save anything, even from the most frugal living. The dire

struggle to secure food, clothing and shelter is such that little

energy is left wherewith to aspire to anything, to demand anything,

either for themselves or their children. Unless, therefore, the

government provided the buildings, the books, and appliances, and paid

the teachers' salaries, it is easy to see that the people most in need

of education are least able, and least likely, to provide it for

themselves. Furthermore the government itself, unless it can tax the

wealthier classes for it, cannot out of such an impoverished source

wring sufficient means to provide adequate schools and school

equipments.

Now, the wealthiest classes are just the religious orders. According to

the statement of Monsignor José Valeda de Gunjado, these orders own

two-thirds of the money of the country and one-third of the wealth in

property. These orders are utterly opposed to all education except such

as they themselves furnish--a lamentable travesty on learning.

As a writer who has investigated these conditions personally, observes,

in reply to the question, "Does not the Church provide numbers of

schools, day and night, at its own expense?"--"It does,--unhappily for

Spain." It provides schools whose principal aim is to strengthen

superstition, follow a mediaeval curriculum, _keep out_ scientific

light,--and prevent other and better schools from being established.

A Spanish educational journal (_La Escuela Espanola_), not Ferrer's

journal, declared in 1907 that these schools were largely "without light

or ventilation, dens of death, ignorance, and bad training." It was

estimated that 50,000 children died every year in consequence of the

mischievous character of the school rooms. And even to schools like

these, there were half a million children in Spain who could gain no

admittance.

As to the teachers, they are allowed a salary ranging from $50.00 to

$100.00 a year; but this is provided, not by the State, but through

voluntary donations from the parents. So that a teacher, in addition to

his legitimate functions, must perform those of collector of his own

salary.

Now conceive that he is endeavoring to collect it from parents whose

wages amount to two or three dollars a week; and you will not be

surprised at the case reported by a Madrid paper in 1903 of a master's

having canvassed a district to find how many parents would contribute if

he opened a school. Out of one hundred families, three promised their

support!

Is it any wonder that the law of compulsory education is a mockery? How

could it be anything else?

Now let us look at the products of this popular ignorance, and we shall

presently understand why the Church fosters it, why it fights education;

and also why the Catalonian insurrection of 1909, which began as a

strike of workers in protest against the Moroccan war, ended in mob

attacks upon convents, monasteries, and churches.

I have already quoted the statement of a high Spanish prelate that the

religious orders of Spain own two-thirds of the money of Spain, and

one-third of the wealth in property. Whether this estimate is precisely

correct or not, it is sufficiently near correctness to make us aware

that at least a great portion of the wealth of the country has passed

into their hands,--a state not widely differing from that existing in

France prior to the great Revolution. Before the insurrection of last

year, the city of Barcelona alone had 165 convents, many of which were

exceedingly rich. The province of Catalonia maintained 2,300 of these

institutions. Aside from these religious orders with their accumulations

of wealth, the Church itself, the united body of priests not in orders,

is immensely wealthy. Conceive that in the Cathedral at Toledo there is

an image of the Virgin whose wardrobe alone would be sufficient to build

hundreds of schools. Imagine that this doll, which is supposed to

symbolize the forlorn young woman who in her pain and sorrow and need

was driven to seek shelter in a stable, whose life was ever lowly, and

who is called the Mother of Sorrows,--imagine that this image of her has

become a vulgar coquette sporting a robe whereinto are sown 85,000

pearls, besides as many more sapphires, amethysts, and diamonds!

Oh, what a decoration for the mother of the Carpenter of Nazareth! What

a vision for the dying eyes on the Cross to look forward to! What an

outcome of the gospel of salvation free to the poor and lowly, taught by

the poorest and the lowliest,--that the humble keeper of the humble

household of the despised little village of Judea should be imaged forth

as a Queen of Gauds, bedizened with a crown worth $25,000 and bracelets

valued at $10,000 more. The Virgin Mary, the Daughter of the Stable,

transformed into a diamond merchant's showcase!

And this in the midst of men and women working for just enough to keep

the skin upon the bone; in the midst of children who are denied the

primary necessities of childhood.

Now I ask you, when the fury of these people burst, as under the

provocation they received it was inevitable that it should burst, was it

any wonder that it manifested itself in mob violence against the

institutions which mock their suffering by this useless, senseless,

criminal waste of wealth in the face of utter need?

Will some one now whisper in our ears that there are women in America

who decorate themselves with more jewels than the Virgin of Toledo, and

throw away the price of a school on a useless decoration in a single

night; while within a radius of five miles from them there are also

uneducated children, for whom our School Boards can provide no place?

Yes, it is so; let them remember the mobs of Barcelona!

And let me remember I am talking about Spain!

The question naturally intrudes, How does the Church, how do the

religious orders manage to accumulate such wealth? Remember first that

they are old, and of unbroken continuance for hundreds of years. That

various forms of acquisition, in operation for centuries, would produce

immense accumulations, even supposing nothing but legitimate purchases

and gifts. But when we consider the actual means whereby money is daily

absorbed from the people by these institutions we receive a shock which

sets all our notions of the triumph of Modern Science topsy-turvy.

It is almost impossible to realize, and yet it is true, that the Spanish

Church still deals in that infamous "graft" against which Martin Luther

hurled the splendid force of his wrath four hundred years ago. The

Church of Spain still sells indulgences. Every Catholic bookstore, and

every priest, has them for sale. They are called "bulas." Their prices

range from about 15 to 25 cents, and they constitute an elastic excuse

for doing pretty much what the possessor pleases to do, providing it is

not a capital crime, for a definitely named period.

Probably there is no one in America so little able to believe this

condition to exist, as the ordinary well-informed Roman Catholic. I have

myself listened to priests of the Roman faith giving the conditions on

which pardon for venal offenses might be obtained; and they had nothing

to do with money. They consisted in saying a certain number of prayers

at stated periods, with specified intent. While that may be a very

illogical way of putting things together that have no connection, there

is nothing in it to offend one's ideas of honesty. The enlightened

conscience of an entire mass of people has demanded that a spiritual

offense be dealt with by spiritual means. It would revolt at the idea

that such grace could be written out on paper and sold either to the

highest bidder or for a fixed price.

But now conceive what happens where a people are illiterate, regarding

written documents with that superstitious awe which those who cannot

read always have for the mysterious language of learning; regarding them

besides with the combination of fear and reverence which the ignorant

believer entertains for the visible sign of Supernatural Power, the

Power which holds over him the threat of eternal punishment,--and you

will have what goes on in Spain. Add to this that such a condition of

fear and gullibility on the side of the people, is the great opportunity

of the religious "grafter." Whatever number of honest, self-sacrificing,

devoted people may be attracted to the service of the Church, there will

certainly be found also, the cheat, the impostor, the searcher for ease

and power.

These indulgences, which for 15 or 25 cents pardon the buyer for his

past sins, but are good only till he sins again, constitute a species of

permission to do what otherwise is forbidden; the most expensive one,

the 25c-one, is practically a license to hold stolen property up to a

certain amount.

Both rich and poor buy these things, the rich of course paying a good

deal more than the stipulated sum. But it hardly requires the statement

that an immense number of the very poor buy them also. And from this

horrible traffic the Church of Spain annually draws millions.

There are other sources of income such as the sale of scapulars,

agnus-deis, charms, and other pieces of trumpery, which goes on all over

the Catholic world also, but naturally to no such extent as in Spain,

Portugal, and Italy, where popular ignorance may be again measured by

the materialism of its religion.

Now, is it reasonable to suppose that the individuals who are thriving

upon these sales, want a condition of popular enlightenment? Do they not

know how all this traffic would crumble like the ash of a burnt-out

fire, once the blaze of science were to flame through Spain? _They_

EDUCATE! Yes; they educate the people to believe in these barbaric

relics of a dead time,--_for their own material interest_. Spain and

Portugal are the last resort of the mediaeval church; the monasticism

and the Jesuitry which have been expelled from other European countries,

and compelled to withdraw from Cuba and the Philippines, have

concentrated there; and there they are making their last fight. There

they will go down into their eternal grave; but not till Science has

invaded the dark corners of the popular intellect.

The political condition is parallel with the religious condition of the

people, with the exception that the State is poor while the Church is

rich.

There are some elements in the government which are opposed to the

Church religiously, which nevertheless do not wish to see its power as

an institution upset, because they foresee that the same people who

would overthrow the Church, would later overthrow them. These, too, wish

to see the people kept ignorant.

Nevertheless, there have been numerous political rebellions in Spain,

having for their object the establishment of a republic.

In 1868 there occurred such a rebellion, under the leadership of Ruiz

Zorilla. At that time, Ferrer was not quite 20 years old. He had

acquired an education by his own efforts. He was a declared Republican,

as it seems that every young, ardent, bright-minded youth, seeing what

the condition of his country was, and wishing for its betterment, would

be. Zorilla was for a short time Minister of Public Instruction, under

the new government, and very zealous for popular education.

Naturally he became an object of admiration and imitation to Ferrer.

In the early eighties, after various fluctuations of political power,

Zorilla, who had been absent from Spain, returned to it, and began the

labor of converting the soldiers to republicanism. Ferrer was then a

director of railways, and of much service to Zorilla in the practical

work of organization. In 1885 this movement culminated in an abortive

revolution, wherein both Ferrer and Zorilla took active part, and were

accordingly compelled to take refuge in France upon the failure of the

insurrection.

It is therefore certain that from his entrance into public agitation

till the year 1885, Ferrer was an active revolutionary republican,

believing in the overthrow of Spanish tyranny by violence.

There is no question that at that time he said and wrote things which,

whether we shall consider them justifiable or not, were openly in favor

of forcible rebellion. Such utterances charged against him at the

alleged trial in 1909, which were really his, were quotations from this

period. Remember he was then 26 years old. When the trial occurred, he

was 50 years old. What had been his mental evolution during those 24

years?

In Paris, where, with the exception of a short intermission in 1889 when

he visited Spain, he remained for about fifteen years, he naturally

drifted into a method of making a living quite common to educated exiles

in a foreign land; viz., giving private lessons in his native language.

But while this is with most a mere temporary makeshift, which they

change for something else as soon as they are able, to Ferrer it

revealed what his real business in life should be; he found teaching to

be his genuine vocation; so much so that he took part in several

movements for popular education in Paris, giving much free service.

This participation in the labor of training the mind, which is always a

slow and patient matter, began to have its effect on his conceptions of

political change. Slowly the idea of a Spain regenerated through the

storm blasts of revolution, mightily and suddenly, faded out of his

belief, being replaced, probably almost insensibly, by the idea that a

thorough educational enlightenment must precede political

transformation, if that transformation were to be permanent. This

conviction he voiced with strange power and beauty of expression, when

he said to his old revolutionary Republican friend, Alfred Naquet: "Time

respects those works alone which Time itself has helped to build."

Naquet himself, old and sinking man as he is, is at this day and hour

heart and soul for forcible revolution; admitting all the evils which it

engenders and all the dangers of miscarriage which accompany it, he

still believes, to quote his own words, that "Revolutions are not only

the marvelous accoucheurs of societies; they are also fecundating

forces. They fructify men's intelligences; and if they determine the

final realization of matured evolutions, they also become, through their

action on human minds, points of departure for newer evolutions." Yet

he, who thus sings the paean of the uprisen people, with a fire of youth

and an ardor of love that sound like the singing of some strong young

blacksmith marching at the head of an insurgent column, rather than the

quavering voice of an old spent man; he, who was the warm personal

friend of Ferrer for many years, and who would surely have wished that

his ideal love should also have been his friend's love, he expressly

declares that Ferrer was of those who feel themselves drawn to the field

of preparative labor, making sure the ground over which the Revolution

may march to enduring results.

This then was the ripened condition of his mind, especially after the

death of Zorilla, and all his subsequent life and labor is explicable

only with this understanding of his mental attitude.

In the confusion of deafening voices, it has been declared that not only

did he not take part in last year's manifestations, nor instigate them;

but that he in fact had become a Tolstoyan, a non-resistant.

This is not true: he undoubtedly understood that the introduction of

popular education into Spain means revolt, sooner or later. And he would

certainly have been glad to see a successful revolt overthrow the

monarchy at Madrid. He did not wish the people to be submissive; it is

one of the fundamental teachings of the schools he founded that the

assertive spirit of the child is to be encouraged; that its will is not

to be broken; that the sin of other schools is the forcing of obedience.

He hoped to help to form a young Spain which would not submit; which

would resist, resist consciously, intelligently, steadily. He did not

wish to enlighten people merely to render them more sensitive to their

pains and deprivations, but that they might so use their enlightenment

as to rid themselves of the system of exploitation by Church and State

which is responsible for their miseries. By what means they would choose

to free themselves, he did not make his affair.

How and when were these schools founded? It was during his long sojourn

in Paris, that he had as a private pupil in Spanish, a middle-aged,

wealthy, unmarried, Catholic lady. After much conflict over religion

between teacher and pupil, the latter modified her orthodoxy greatly;

and especially after her journeys to Spain, where she herself saw the

condition of public instruction.

Eventually she became interested in Ferrer's conceptions of education,

and his desire to establish schools in his own country. And when she

died in 1900 (she was then somewhat over 50 years old) she devised a

certain part of her property to Ferrer, to be used as he saw fit,

feeling assured no doubt that he would see fit to use it not for his

personal advantage, but for the purpose so dear to his heart. Which he

did.

The bequest amounted to about $150,000; and the first expenditure was

for the establishment of the Modern School of Barcelona, in the year

1901.

It should be said that this was not the first of the Modern School

movement in Spain; for previous to that, and for several years, there

had sprung up, in various parts of the country, a spontaneous movement

towards self-education; a very heroic effort, in a way, considering that

the teachers were generally workingmen who had spent their day in the

shops, and were using the remainder of their exhausted strength to

enlighten their fellow-workers and the children. These were largely

night-schools. As there were no means behind these efforts, the

buildings in which they were held were of course unsuitable; there was

no proper plan of work; no sufficient equipment, and little

co-ordination of labor. A considerable percentage of these schools were

already on the decline, when Ferrer, equipped with his splendid

organizing ability, his teacher's experience, and Mlle. Meunier's

endowment, opened the Barcelona School, having as pupils eighteen boys

and twelve girls.

So proper to the demand was this effort, that at the end of four years'

earnest activity, fifty schools had been established, ten in Barcelona,

and forty in the provinces.

In 1906, that is, after five years' work, a banquet was held on Good

Friday, at which 1,700 pupils were present.

From 30 to 1,700,--that is something. And a banquet in Catholic Spain on

Good Friday! A banquet of children who have bade good-bye to the

salvation of the soul by the punishment of the stomach! We here may

laugh; but in Spain it was a triumph and a menace, which both sides

understood.

I have said that Ferrer brought to his work splendid organizing ability.

This he speedily put to purpose by enlisting the co-operation of a

number of the greatest scientists of Europe in the preparation of

text-books embodying the discoveries of science, couched in language

comprehensible to young minds.

So far, I am sorry to say, I have not succeeded in getting copies of

these manuals; the Spanish government confiscated most of them, and has

probably destroyed them. Still there are some uncaptured sets (one is

already in the British Museum) and I make no doubt that within a year or

so we shall have translations of most of them.

There were thirty of these manuals all told, comprising the work of the

three sections, primary, intermediate, and superior, into which the

pupils were divided.

From what I have been able to find out about these books, I believe the

most interesting of them all would be the First Reading Book. It was

prepared by Dr. Odon de Buen, and is said to be at the same time "a

speller, a grammar and an illustrated manual of evolution," "the

majestic story of the evolution of the cosmos from the atom to the

thinking being, related in a language simple, comprehensible to the

child."

20,000 copies of this book were rapidly sold.

Imagine what that meant to Catholic schools! That the babies of Spain

should learn nothing about eternal punishment for their deadly sins, and

_should_ learn that they are one in a long line of unfolding life that

started in the lowly sea-slime!

The books on geography, physics, and minerology were written in like

manner and with like intent by the same author; on anthropology, Dr.

Enguerrand wrote, and on evolution, Dr. Letourneau of Paris.

Among the very suggestive works was one on "The Universal Substance," a

collaborate production of Albert Bloch and Paraf Javal, in which the

mysteries of existence are resolved into their chemical equivalents, so

that the foundations for magic and miracle are unceremoniously cleared

out of the intellectual field.

This book was prepared at Ferrer's special request, as an antidote to

ancestral leanings, inherited superstitions, the various outside

influences counteracting the influences of the school.

The methods of instruction were modeled after earlier attempts in

France, and were based on the general idea that physical and

intellectual education must continually supplement each other. That no

one is really educated, so long as his knowledge is merely the

recollection of what he has read or seen in a book. Accordingly a lesson

often consisted of a visit to a factory, a workshop, a studio, or a

laboratory, where things were explained and illustrated; or in a class

journey to the hills, or the sea, or the open country, where the

geological or topographical conditions were studied, or botanical

specimens collected and individual observation encouraged.

Very often even book classes were held out of doors, and the children

insensibly put in touch with the great pervading influences of nature, a

touch too often lost, or never felt at all, in our city environments.

How different was all this from the incomprehensible theology of the

Catholic schools to be learned and believed but not understood, the

impractical rehearsing of strings of words characteristic of mediaeval

survivals! No wonder the Modern Schools grew and grew, and the hatred of

the priests waxed hotter and hotter.

Their opportunity came; indeed, they did not wait long.

In the year 1906, on the 31st day of May, not so very long after that

Good Friday banquet, occurred the event which they seized upon to crush

the Modern School and its founder.

I am not here to speak either for or against Mateo Morral. He was a

wealthy young man, of much energy and considerable learning. He had

helped to enrich the library of the Modern School and being an excellent

linguist, he had offered to make translations of text-books. Ferrer had

accepted the offer. That is all Morral had to do with the Modern School.

But on the day of royal festivities, Morral had it in his head to throw

a bomb where it would do some royal hurt. He missed his calculations,

and the hurt intended did not take place; but after a short interval,

finding himself about to be captured, he killed himself.

Think of him as you please: think that he was a madman who did a

madman's act; think that he was a generous enthusiast who in an outburst

of long chafing indignation at his country's condition wanted to strike

a blow at a tyrannical monarchy, and was willing to give his own life

in exchange for the tyrant's; or better than this, reserve your

judgment, and say that you know not the man nor his personal condition,

nor the special external conditions that prompted him; and that without

such knowledge he cannot be judged. But whatever you think of Morral,

pray why was Ferrer arrested and the Modern School of Barcelona closed?

Why was he thrown in prison and kept there for more than a year? Why was

it sought to railroad him before a Court Martial, and that attempt

failing, the civil trial postponed for all that time?

=Why? Why?=

Because Ferrer taught science to the children of Spain,--and for no

other thing. His enemies would have killed him then; but having been

compelled to yield an open trial, by the outcry of Europe, they were

also compelled to release him. But I imagine I hear, yea hear, the

resolute mutter behind the closed walls of the monasteries, the day

Ferrer went free. "Go, then; we shall get you again. And then----"

And then they would do what three years later they did,--_damn him to

the ditch of_ =Montjuich=.

Yea, they shut their lips together like the thin lips of Fate

and--waited. The hatred of an order has something superb in it,--it

hates so relentlessly, so constantly, so transcendently; its personnel

changes, its hate never alters; it wears one priest's face or another's;

itself is identical, inexorable; it pursues to the end.

Did Ferrer know this? Undoubtedly in a general way he did. And yet he

was so far from conceiving its appalling remorselessness, that even when

he found himself in prison again, and utterly in their power, he could

not believe that he would not be freed.

What was this opportunity for which the Jesuitry of Spain waited with

such terrible security? The Catalonian uprising. How did they know it

would come? As any sane man, not over-optimistic, knows that uprising

must come in Spain. Ferrer hoped to sap away the foundations of tyranny

through peaceful enlightenment. He was right. But they are also right

who say that there are other forces hurling towards those foundations;

the greatest of these,--_Starvation_.

Now it was plain and simple Starvation that rose to rend its starvers

when the Catalonian women rose in mobs to cry against the command that

was taking away their fathers and sons to their death in Morocco. The

Spanish people did not want the Moroccan war; the Government, in the

interest of a number of capitalists, did; but like all governments and

all capitalists, it wanted workingmen to do the dying. And they did not

want to die, and leave their wives and children to die too. So they

rebelled. At first it was the conscious, orderly protest of organized

workingmen. But Starvation no more respects the commands of workingmen's

unions, than the commands of governments, and other orderly bodies. It

has nothing to lose: and it gets away, in its fury, from all management;

and it riots.

Where Churches and Monasteries are offensively rich and at ease in the

face of Hunger, Hunger takes its revenge. It has long fangs, it rends,

and tears, and tramples--the innocent with the guilty--always. It is

very horrible! But remember,--remember how much more horrible is the

long, slow systematic crushing, wasting, drying of men upon their bones,

which year after year, century after century, has begotten the Monster,

Hunger. Remember the 50,000 innocent children annually slaughtered, the

blinded and the crippled children, maimed and forsaken by social power;

and behind the smoke and flame of the burning convents of July, 1909,

see the staring of those sightless eyes.

Ferrer instigate that mad frenzy! Oh, no; it was a mightier than Ferrer!

"Our Lady of Pain"--Our Lady of Hunger--Our Lady with uncut nails and

wolf-like teeth--Our Lady who bears the Man-flesh in her body that

cannon are to tear--Our Lady the Workingwoman of Spain, ahungered. She

incarnated the Red Terror.

And the enemies of Ferrer in 1906, as in 1909, knew that such things

would come; and they bided their time.

It is one of those pathetic things which destiny deals, that it was only

for love's sake--and most for the love of a little child--who died

moreover--that the uprising found Ferrer in Spain at all. He had been in

England, investigating schools and methods there from April until the

middle of June. Word came that his sister-in-law and his niece were ill,

so the 19th of June found him at the little girl's bedside. He intended

soon after to go to Paris, but delayed to make some inquiries for a

friend concerning the proceedings of the Electrical Society of

Barcelona. So the storm caught him as it caught thousands of others.

He went about the business of his publishing house as usual, making the

observations of an interested spectator of events. To his friend Naquet

he sent a postal card on the 26th of July, in which he spoke of the

heroism of the women, the lack of co-ordination in the people's

movements, and the total absence of leaders, as a curious phenomenon.

Hearing soon after that he was to be arrested, he secluded himself for

five weeks. The "White Terror" was in full sway; 3,000 men, women, and

children had been arrested, incarcerated, inhumanly treated. Then the

Chief Prosecutor issued the statement that Ferrer was "the director of

the revolutionary movement."

Too indignant to listen to the appeals of his friends, he started to

Barcelona to give himself up and demand trial. He was arrested on the

way.

And they court-martialed him.

The proceedings were utterly infamous. No chance to confront witnesses

against him; no opportunity to bring witnesses; not even the books

accused of sedition allowed to offer their mute testimony in their own

defense; no opportunity given to his defender to prepare; letters sent

from England and France to prove what had been the doomed man's purposes

and occupations during his stay there, "lost in transit"; the old

articles of twenty-four years before, made to appear as if recent

utterances; forgeries imposed; and with all this, nothing but hearsay

evidence even from his accusers; and yet--he was sentenced to death.

Sentenced to death and shot.

And all Modern Schools closed, and his property sequestrated.

And the Virgin of Toledo may wear her gorgeous robes in peace, since the

shadow of the darkness has stolen back over the circle of light he lit.

Only,--somewhere, somewhere, down in the obscurity--hovers the menacing

figure of her rival, "Our Lady of Pain." She is still now,--but she is

not dead. And if all things be taken from her, and the light not allowed

to come to her, nor to her children,--then--some day--she will set her

own lights in the darkness.

Ferrer--Ferrer is with the immortals. His work is spreading over the

world; it will yet return, and rid Spain of its tyrants.

Modern Educational Reform

Questions of genuine importance to large masses of people, are not posed

by a single questioner, nor even by a limited number. They are put with

more or less precision, with more or less consciousness of their scope

and demand by all classes involved. This is a fair test of its being a

genuine question, rather than a temporary fad. Such is the test we are

to apply to the present inquiry, What is wrong with our present method

of Child Education? What is to be done in the way of altering or

abolishing it?

The posing of the question acquired a sudden prominence, through the

world-shocking execution of a great educator for alleged complicity in

the revolutionary events of Spain during the Moroccan war. People were

not satisfied with the Spanish government's declarations as to this

official murder; they were not convinced that they were being told the

truth. They inquired why the Government should be so anxious for that

man's death. And they learned that as a teacher he had founded schools

wherein ideas hostile to governmental programs for learning, were put in

practice. And they have gone on asking to know what these ideas were,

how they were taught, and how can those same ideas be applied to the

practical questions of education confronting them in the persons of

their own children.

But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that the question was

raised out of nothingness, or out of the brilliancy of his own mind, by

Francisco Ferrer. If it were, if he were the creator of the question

instead of the response to it, his martyr's death could have given it

but an ephemeral prominence which would speedily have subsided.

On the contrary, the inquiry stimulated by that tragic death was but the

first loud articulation of what has been asked in thousands of

school-rooms, millions of homes, all over the civilized world. It has

been put, by each of the three classes concerned, each in its own

peculiar way, from its own peculiar viewpoint,--by the Educator, by the

Parent, and by the Child itself.

There is a fourth personage who has had a great deal to say, and still

has; but to my mind he is a pseudo-factor, to be eliminated as speedily

as possible. I mean the "Statesman." He considers himself profoundly

important, as representing the interests of society in general. He is

anxious for the formation of good citizens to support the State, and

directs education in such channels as he thinks will produce these.

I prefer to leave the discussion of his peculiar functions for a later

part of this address, here observing only that if he is a legitimate

factor, if by chance he is a genuine educator strayed into

statesmanship, _as_ a statesman he is interested only from a secondary

motive; i. e., he is not interested in the actual work of schools, in

the children as persons, but in the producing of a certain type of

character to serve certain subsequent ends.

The criticism offered by the child itself upon the prevailing system of

instruction, is the most simple,--direct; and at the same time, the

critic is utterly unconscious of its force. Who has not heard a child

say, in that fretted whine characteristic of a creature who knows its

protest will be ineffective: "But what do I have to learn that

for?"--"Oh, I don't see what I have to know that for; I can't remember

it anyway." "I hate to go to school; I'd just as lief take a whipping!"

"My teacher's a mean old thing; she expects you to sit quiet the whole

morning, and if you just make the least little noise, she keeps you in

at recess. Why do we have to keep still so long? What good does it do?"

I remember well the remark made to me once by one of my teachers--and a

very good teacher, too, who nevertheless did not see what her own

observation ought to have suggested. "School-children," she said,

"regard teachers as their natural enemies." The thought which it would

have been logical to suppose would have followed this observation is,

that if children in general are possessed of that notion, it is because

there is a great deal in the teacher's treatment of them which runs

counter to the child's nature: that possibly this is so, not because of

natural cussedness on the part of the child, but because of

inapplicability of the knowledge taught, or the manner of teaching it,

or both, to the mental and physical needs of the child. I am quite sure

no such thought entered my teacher's mind,--at least regarding the

system of knowledge to be imposed; being a sensible woman, she perhaps

occasionally admitted to herself that she might make mistakes in

applying the rules, but that the body of knowledge to be taught was

indispensable, and must somehow be injected into children's heads, under

threat of punishment, if necessary, I am sure she never questioned. It

did not occur to her any more than to most teachers, that the first

business of an educator should be to find out what are the needs,

aptitudes, and tendencies of children, before he or she attempts to

outline a body of knowledge to be taught, or rules for teaching it. It

does not occur to them that the child's question, "What do I have to

learn that for?" is a perfectly legitimate question; and if the teacher

cannot answer it to the child's satisfaction, something is wrong either

with the thing taught, or with the teaching; either the thing taught is

out of rapport with the child's age, or his natural tendencies, or his

condition of development; or the method by which it is taught repels

him, disgusts him, or at best fails to interest him.

When a child says, "I don't see why I have to know that; I can't

remember it anyway," he is voicing a very reasonable protest. Of course,

there are plenty of instances of wilful shirking, where a little effort

can overcome the slackness of memory; but every teacher who is honest

enough to reckon with himself knows he cannot give a sensible reason why

things are to be taught which have so little to do with the child's life

that to-morrow, or the day after examination, they will be forgotten;

things which he himself could not remember were he not repeating them

year in and year out, as a matter of his trade. And every teacher who

has thought at all for himself about the essential nature of the young

humanity he is dealing with, knows that six hours of daily herding and

in-penning of young, active bodies and limbs, accompanied by the

additional injunction that no feet are to be shuffled, no whispers

exchanged, and no paper wads thrown, is a frightful violation of all the

laws of young life. Any gardener who should attempt to raise healthy,

beautiful, and fruitful plants by outraging all those plants'

instinctive wants and searchings, would meet as his reward--sickly

plants, ugly plants, sterile plants, dead plants. He will not do it; he

will watch very carefully to see whether they like much sunlight, or

considerable shade, whether they thrive on much water or get drowned in

it, whether they like sandy soil, or fat mucky soil; the plant itself

will indicate to him when he is doing the right thing. And every

gardener will watch for indications with great anxiety. If he finds the

plant revolts against his experiments, he will desist at once, and try

something else; if he finds it thrives, he will emphasize the particular

treatment so long as it seems beneficial. But what he will surely not

do, will be to prepare a certain area of ground all just alike, with

equal chances of sun and amount of moisture in every part, and then

plant everything together without discrimination,--mighty close

together!--saying beforehand, "If plants don't want to thrive on this,

they ought to want to; and if they are stubborn about it, they must be

made to."

Or if a raiser of animals were to start in feeding them on a regimen

adapted not to their tastes but to his; if he were to insist on stuffing

the young ones with food only fitted for the older ones; if he were to

shut them up and compel them somehow to be silent, stiff, and motionless

for hours together,--he would--well, he would very likely be arrested

for cruelty to animals.

Of course there is this difference between the grower of plants or

animals and the grower of children; the former is dealing with his

subject as a superior power with a force which will always remain

subject to his, while the latter is dealing with a force which is bound

to become his equal, and taking it in the long and large sense, bound

ultimately to supersede him. The fear of "the footfalls of the young

generation" is in his ears, whether he is aware of it or not, and he

instinctively does what every living thing seeks to do; viz., to

preserve his power. Since he cannot remain forever the superior, the

dictator, he endeavors to put a definite mould upon that power which he

must share--to have the child learn what he has learned, as he has

learned it, and to the same end that he has learned it.

The grower of flowers, or fruits, or vegetables, or the raiser of

animals, secure in his forever indisputable superiority, has nothing to

fear when he inquires into the ways of his subjects; he will never

think: "But if I heed such and such manifestation of the flower's or the

animal's desire or repulsion, it will develop certain tendencies as a

result, which will eventually overturn me and mine, and all that I

believe in and labor to preserve." The grower of children is perpetually

beset by this fear. He must not listen to a child's complaint against

the school: it breaks down the mutual relation of authority and

obedience; it destroys the faith of the child that his olders know

better than he; it sets up little centers of future rebellion in the

brain of every child affected by the example. No: complaint as to the

wisdom of the system must be discouraged, ignored, frowned down, crushed

by superior dignity; if necessary, punished. The very best answer a

child ever gets to its legitimate inquiry, "Why do I have to learn such

and such a thing?" is, "Wait till you get older, and you will understand

it all. Just now you are a little too young to understand the

reasons."--(In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the answerer got the

same reply to his own question twenty years before; and he has never

found out since, either). "Do as we tell you to, now," say the teachers,

"and be sure that we are instructing you for your good. The explanations

will become clear to you some time." And the child smothers his

complaint, cramps his poor little body to the best of his ability, and

continues to repeat definitions which mean nothing to him but strings of

long words, and rules which to him are simply torture--apparatus

invented by his "natural enemies" to plague children.--I recall quite

distinctly the bitter resentment I felt toward the inverted divisor. The

formula was easy enough to remember: "Invert the terms of the divisor

and proceed as in multiplication of fractions." I memorized it in less

than a minute, and followed the prescription, and got my examples,

correct. But "Oh, how, how was the miracle accomplished? Why should a

fraction be made to stand on its head? and how did that change a

division suddenly into a multiplication?"--And I never found out till I

undertook to teach some one else, years afterward. Yet the thing could

have been made plain then; perhaps would have been, but for the fact

that as a respectful pupil I was so trained to think that my teachers'

methods must not be questioned or their explanations reflected upon,

that I sat mute, mystified, puzzled, and silently indignant. In the end

I swallowed it as I did a lot of other "pre-digested" knowledge (?) and

consented to use its miraculous nature, very much as my Christian

friends use the body and blood of Christ to "wash their sins away"

without very well understanding the modus operandi.

Another advantage which the botanical or zoölogical cultivator has over

the child-grower, by which incidentally the plants and animals profit,

is that since he is not seeking to produce a universal type, but rather

to develop as many new and interesting types as he can, he is very

studious to notice the inclinations of his subjects, observing possible

beginnings of differentiation, and adapting his treatment to the

development of such beginnings. Of course he also does what no

child-cultivator could possibly do,--he ruthlessly destroys weaklings;

and as the superior intermeddling divinity, he fosters those special

types which are more serviceable to himself, irrespective of whether

they are more serviceable to plant or animal life apart from man.

But is the fact that children are of the same race as ourselves, the

fact that their development should be regarded from the point of how

best shall they serve themselves, their own race and generation, not

that of a discriminating overlord, assuming the power of life and death

over them,--a reason for us to disregard their tendencies, aptitudes,

likes and dislikes, altogether?--a reason for us to treat their natural

manifestations of non-adaptation to our methods of treatment with less

consideration than we give to a fern or a hare? I should, on the

contrary, suppose it was a reason to consider them all the more.

I think the difficulty lies in the immeasurable vanity of the human

adult, particularly the pedagogical adult, (I presume I may say it with

less offense since I am a teacher myself), which does not permit him to

recognize as good any tendency in children to fly in the face of his

conceptions of a correct human being; to recognize that may be here is

something highly desirable, to be encouraged, rather than destroyed as

pernicious. A flower-gardener doesn't expect to make another voter or

householder out of his fern, so he lets it show what it wants to be,

without being at all horrified at anything it does; but your teacher has

usually well-defined conceptions of what men and women have to be. And

if a boy is too lively, too noisy, too restless, too curious, to suit

the concept, he must be trimmed and subdued. And if he is lazy, he has

to be spurred with all sorts of whips, which are offensive both to the

handler and the handled. The weapons of shaming and arousing the spirit

of rivalry are two which are much used,--the former with sometimes fatal

results, as in the case of the nine year old boy who recently committed

suicide because his teacher drew attention to his torn coat, or young

girls who have worried themselves into fevers from a scornful word

respecting their failures in scholarship, and arousing rivalry brings an

evil train behind it of spites and jealousies. I do not say, as some

enthusiasts do, "there are no bad children," or "there are no lazy

children"; but I am quite sure that both badness and laziness often

result from lack of understanding and lack of adaptation; and that these

can only be attained by teachers comprehending that they must seek to

understand as well as to be understood. Badness is sometimes only dammed

up energy, which can no more help flooding over than dammed up water.

Laziness is often the result of forcing a child to a task for which it

has no natural liking, while it would be energetic enough, given the

thing it liked to do.

At any rate, it is worth while to try to find out what is the matter, in

the spirit of a searcher after truth. Which is the first point I want to

establish: That the general complaints of children are true criticisms

of the school system; and Superintendents of Public Instruction, Boards

of Education, and Teachers have as their first duty to heed and consider

these complaints.

Let us now consider the complaints of parents. It must be admitted that

the parents of young children, particularly their mothers, and

especially these latter when they are the wives of workingmen with

good-sized families, regard the school rather as a convenience for

getting rid of the children during a certain period of the day than

anything else. They are not to be blamed for this. They have obeyed the

imperative mandate of nature in having families, with no very adequate

conception of what they were doing; they find themselves burdened with

responsibilities often greatly beyond their capacity. They have all they

can do, sometimes more than they can do, to manage the financial end of

things, to see to their children's material wants and to get through

the work of a house; very often they are themselves deficient in even

the elementary knowledge of the schools; they feel that their children

need to know a great deal that they have never known, but they are

utterly without the ability to say whether what they learn is useful and

important or not. With the helplessness of ignorance towards wisdom,

they receive the system provided by the State on trust, presuming it is

good; and with the pardonable relief of busy and overburdened people,

they look at the clock as school hour approaches, and breathe a sigh of

relief when the last child is out of the house. They would be shocked at

the idea that they regard their children as nuisances; they would

vigorously defend themselves by saying that they feel that the children

are in better hands than their own, safe and well treated. But before

long even these ignorant ones observe that their children have learned a

number of things which are not good. They have mixed with a crowd of

others, and somewhere among them they have learned bad language, bad

ideas, and bad habits. These are complaints which may be heard from

intelligent, educated, and conservative parents also,--parents who may

be presumed to be satisfied with the spirit and general purpose of the

knowledge imparted in the class-room. Also the children suffer in health

through their schools; and later on, when the cramming and crowding of

their brains goes on in earnest, as it does in the higher grades, and

particularly the High Schools, Oh then springs up a terrible crop of

headache, nervous prostration, hysterics, over-delicacy, anaemia,

heart-palpitation (especially among the girls), and a harvest of other

physical disorders which were very probably planted back in the primary

departments, and fostered in the higher rooms. The students are so

overtrained that they often "become good for nothing in the house," the

parents say, and too late the mothers discover that they themselves

become servants to the whimsical little ladies and gentlemen they have

raised up, who are more interested in text-books than in practical

household matters.

Such are the ordinary complaints heard on every side, uttered by those

who really have no fault to find with the substance of the instruction

itself,--some because they do not know, and some because it fairly

represents their own ideas.

The complaint becomes much more vital and definite when it proceeds from

a parent who is an informed person, with a conception of life at

variance with that commonly accepted. I will instance that of a

Philadelphia physician, who recently said to me: "In my opinion many of

the most horrid effects of malformations which I have to deal with, are

the results of the long hours of sitting imposed on children in the

schools. It is impossible for a healthy active creature to sit stiffly

straight so many hours; no one can do it. They will inevitably twist and

squirm themselves down into one position or another which throws the

internal organs out of position, and which by iteration and reiteration

results in a continuously accentuating deformity. Motherhood often

becomes extremely painful and dangerous through the narrowing of the

pelvis produced in early years of so much uncomfortable sitting. I

believe that the sort of schooling which necessitates it should not

begin till a child is fourteen years of age."

He added also that the substance of our education should be such as

would fit the person for the conditions and responsibilities he or she

may reasonably be expected to encounter in life. Since the majority of

boys and girls will most likely become fathers and mothers in the

future, why does not our system of education take account of it, and

instruct the children not in the Latin names of bones and muscles so

much, as in the practical functioning and hygiene of the body? Every

teacher knows, and most of our parents know, that no subject is more

carefully ignored by our text-books on physiology than the reproductive

system.

A like book on zoölogy has far more to say about the reproduction of

animals than is thought fit to be said by human beings to human beings

about themselves. And yet upon such ignorance often depends the ruin of

lives. Such is the criticism of an intelligent physician, himself the

father of five children. It is a typical complaint of those who have to

deal with the physical results of our school system.

A still more forcible complaint is rising up from a class of parents who

object not only negatively, but positively, to the instruction of the

schools. These are saying: I do not want to have my children taught

things which are positively untrue, nor truths which have been distorted

to fit some one's political or religious conception. I do not want any

sort of religion or politics to be put into his head. I want the

accepted facts of natural science and discovery to be taught him, in so

far as they are within the grasp of his intellect. I do not want them

colored with the prejudice of any system. I want a school system which

will be suited to his physical well-being. I want what he learns to

become his, by virtue of its appealing to his taste, his aptitude for

experiment and proof; I do not want it to be a foreign stream pouring

over his lips like a brook over its bed, leaving nothing behind. I do

not want him to be tortured with formal examinations, nor worried by

credit marks with averages and per cents and tenths of per cents, which

haunt him waking and sleeping, as if they were the object of his

efforts. And more than that, and above all, I do not want him made an

automaton. I do not want him to become abjectly obedient. I do not want

his free initiative destroyed. I want him, by virtue of his education,

to be well-equipped bodily and mentally to face life and its problems.

This is my second point: That parents, conservatives and radicals,

criticise the school

1st, As the producer of unhealthy bodies;

2d, As teaching matter inappropriate to life; or rather, perhaps, as not

teaching what is appropriate to life;

3d, As perverting truth to serve a political and religious system; and

as putting an iron mould upon the will of youth, destroying all

spontaneity and freedom of expression.

The third critic is the teacher. Owing to his peculiarly dependent

position, it is very, very seldom that any really vital criticism comes

out of the mouth of an ordinary employé in the public school service:

first, if he has any subversive ideas, he dares not voice them for fear

of his job; second, it is extremely unlikely that any one with

subversive ideas either will apply for the job, or having applied, will

get it; and third, if through some fortuitous combination of

circumstances, a rebellious personage has smuggled himself into the

camp, with the naive notion that he is going to work reforms in the

system, he finds before long that the system is rather remoulding him;

he falls into the routine prescribed, and before long ceases to struggle

against it.

Still, however conservative and system-logged teachers may be, they will

all agree upon one criticism; viz., that they have too much to do; that

it is utterly impossible for them to do justice to every pupil; that

with from thirty to fifty pupils all depending upon one teacher for

instruction, it is out of the question to give any single one

sufficient attention, to say nothing of any special attention which his

peculiar backwardness might require. He could do so only at the expense

of injustice to the rest.

And, indeed, the best teacher in the world could not attend properly to

the mental needs of fifty children, nor even of thirty. Furthermore,

this overcrowding makes necessary the stiff regulation, the formal

discipline, in the maintenance of which so much of the teacher's energy

is wasted. The everlasting roll-call, the record of tardiness and

absence, the eye forever on the watch to see who is whispering, the ear

forever on the alert to catch the scraper of feet, the mischievous

disturber, the irrepressible noisemaker; with such a divided and

subdivided attention, how is it possible to teach?

Here and there we find a teacher with original ideas, not of subjects to

be taught, but of the means of teaching. Sometimes there is one who

inwardly revolts at what he has to teach, and takes such means as he can

to counteract the glorifications of political aggrandizement, with which

our geographies and histories are redolent.

In general, however, public school teachers, like government clerks,

believe very much in the system whereby they live.

What they do find fault with, and what they have very much reason to

find fault with, is not the school system, but the counteracting

influences of bad homes. Teachers are often heard to say that they think

they could do far better with the children, if they had entire control

of them, or, as they more commonly express themselves, "if only their

parents had some common sense!" Lessons of order, neatness, cleanliness,

and hygiene, are often entirely thrown away, because the children regard

them as statements to be memorized, not things to be practised.

Those children whose mothers know nothing of ventilation, the necessity

for exercise, the chemistry of food, and the functioning of the organs

of the body, will forget instructions because they are never made part

of their lives. (Which criticism is a sort of confirmation of that sage

observation: "If you want to reform a man, begin with his grandmother.")

So much for criticism.

What, now, can we offer in the way of suggestions for reform? Speaking

abstractly, I should say that the purpose of education should be to

furnish a child with such fundamental knowledge and habits as will

preserve and strengthen his body, and make him a self-reliant social

being, having an all-around acquaintance with the life which is to

surround him and an adaptability to circumstances which will render him

able to meet varying conditions.

But we are immediately confronted by certain practical queries, when we

attempt to conceive such a school system.

The fact is that the training of the body should be begun in very early

childhood; and can never be rightly done in a city. No other animal than

man ever conceived such a frightful apparatus for depriving its young of

the primary rights of physical existence as the human city. The mass of

our city children know very little of nature. What they have learned of

it through occasional picnics, excursions, visits in the country, etc.,

they have learned as a foreign thing, having little relation to

themselves; their "natural" habitat is one of lifeless brick and mortar,

wire and iron, poles, pavements, and noise. Yet all this ought to be

utterly foreign to children. _This_ ought to be the thing visited once

in a while, not lived in.

There is no pure air in a city; it is _all_ poisoned. Yet the first

necessity of lunged animals--especially little ones--is pure air.

Moreover, every child ought to know the names and ways of life of the

things it eats; how to grow them, etc. How are gardens possible in a

city? Every child should know trees, not as things he has read about,

but as familiar presences in his life, which he recognizes as quickly as

his eyes greet them. He should know his oneness with nature, not through

the medium of a theory, but through feeling it daily and hourly. He

should know the birds by their songs, and by the quick glimpse of them

among the foliage; the insect in its home, the wild flower on its stalk,

the fruit where it hangs. Can this be done in a city?

It is the city that is wrong, and its creations can never be right; they

may be improved; they can never be what they should.

Let me quote Luther Burbank here: he expressed so well, and just in the

tumultuous disorder and un-coordination dear to a child's soul, the

early rights of children. "Every child should have mud-pies,

grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries,

wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in,

water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to

pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries,

and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been

deprived of the best part of his education." He is of opinion that until

ten years of age, these things should be the real educators of

children,--not books. I agree with him. But neither city homes nor city

schools can give children these things. Furthermore, I believe that

education should be integral; that the true school must combine physical

and intellectual education from the beginning to the end. But I am

confronted by the fact that this is impossible to the mass of the

people, because of the economic condition in which we are all

floundering.

What is possible can be only a compromise. Physical education will go on

in the home principally, and intellectual education in the school.

Something might be done to organize the teaching of parents; lectures

and demonstrations at the public schools might be given weekly, in the

evenings, for parents, by competent nurses or hygienists. But they would

remain largely ineffective. Until the whole atrocious system of herding

working people in close-built cities, by way of making them serviceable

cogwheels in the capitalistic machine for grinding out rent and profit,

comes to an end, the physical education of children will remain at best

a pathetic compromise.

We have left to consider what may be done in the way of improving

intellectual education. What is really necessary for a child to know

which he is not taught now? and what is taught that is unnecessary?

As to reading and writing there is no dispute, though there is much

dispute about the way of doing it. But beyond that children should

know--_things_; from their earlier school days they should know the

geography of their own locality, not rehearsing it from a book, but by

going over the ground, having the relations of places explained to them,

and by being shown how to model relief maps themselves. They should know

the indications of the weather, being taught the use of instruments for

measuring air-pressures, temperatures, amount of sunshine, etc.; they

should know the special geology of their own locality, the nature of the

soil and its products, through practical exhibition; they should be

allowed to construct, from clay, stone, or brick, such little buildings

as they usually like to make, and from them the simple principles of

geometry taught. You see, every school needs a big yard, and play-rooms

with tools in them,--the use of which tools they should be taught.

Arithmetic, to be sure, they need to know--but arithmetic connected with

things. Let them learn fractions by cutting up things and putting them

together, and not be bothered by abstractions running into the hundreds

of thousands, the millions, which never in time will they use. And drop

all that tiresome years' work in interest and per cent; if decimals are

understood, every one who has need will be amply able to work out

systems of interest when necessary.

Children should know the industrial life through which they live, into

which they are probably going. They should see how cloth is woven,

thread is spun, shoes are made, iron forged and wrought; again not alone

by written description, but by eye-witness. They should, as they grow

older, learn the history of the arts of peace.

What they do not need to know, is so much of the details of the history

of destruction; the general facts and results of wars are sufficient.

They do not need to be impressed with the details of killings, which

they sensibly forget, and inevitably also.

Moreover, the revolting patriotism which is being inculcated, whereby

children learn to be proud of their country, not for its contributions

to the general enlightenment of humanity, but for its crimes against

humanity; whereby they are taught to consider themselves, their country,

their flag, their institutions, as things to be upheld and maintained,

right or wrong; whereby the stupid and criminal life of the soldier is

exalted as honorable, should be wholly omitted from the educational

system.

However, it is utterly impossible to expect that it will be, by anything

short of general public sentiment against it; and at present such

sentiment is for it. I have alluded before to the function of the

statesman in directing education. So long as schools are maintained by

governments, the Statesman, not the true educator, will determine what

sort of history is to be taught; and it will be what it is now, only

continually growing worse. Political institutions must justify

themselves to the young generation. They begin by training childish

minds to believe that what they do is to be accepted, not criticised. A

history becomes little better than a catechism of patriotic formulas in

glorification of the State.

Now there is no way of escaping this, for those who disapprove it, short

of eliminating the statesman, establishing voluntarily supported

schools, wherein wholly different notions shall be taught; in which the

spirit of teaching history shall be one of honest statement and fearless

criticism; wherein the true image of war and the army and all that it

means shall be honestly given.

The really Ideal School, which would not be a compromise, would be a

boarding school built in the country, having a farm attached, and

workshops where useful crafts might be learned, in daily connection with

intellectual training. It presupposes teachers able to train little

children to habits of health, order, and neatness, in the utmost detail,

and yet not tyrants or rigid disciplinarians. In free contact with

nature, the children would learn to use their limbs as nature meant,

feel their intimate relationship with the growing life of other sorts,

form a profound respect for work and an estimate of the value of it;

wish to become real doers in the world, and not mere gatherers in of

other men's products; and with the respect for work, the appreciation of

work, the desire to work, will come the pride of the true workman who

will know how to maintain his dignity and the dignity of what he does.

At present the major portion of our working people are sorry they are

working people (as they have good reason to be). They take little joy or

pride in what they do; they consider themselves as less gifted and less

valuable persons in society than those who have amassed wealth and, by

virtue of that amassment, live upon their employees; or those who by

attaining book knowledge have gotten out of the field of manual

production, and lead an easier life. They educate their children in the

hope that these, at least, may attain that easier existence, without

work, which has been beyond them. Even when such parents themselves have

dreams of a reorganization of society, wherein all shall labor and all

have leisure due, they impress upon the children that no one should be a

common workingman if he can help it. Workingmen are slaves, and it is

not well to be a slave.

Our radicals fail to realize that to accomplish the reorganization of

work, it is necessary to have _workers_,--and workers with the free

spirit, the rebellious spirit, which will consider its own worth and

refuse to accept the slavish conditions of capitalism. These must be

bred in schools where work is done, and done proudly, and in full

consciousness of its value; where the dubious services of the capitalist

will likewise be rated at their true worth; and no man reckoned as above

another, unless he has done a greater social service. Where political

institutions and the politicians who operate them--judges, lawmakers, or

executives--will be candidly criticised, and repudiated when justice

dictates so, whether in the teaching of their past history, or their

present actions in current events.