EDUCATION AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM--HISTORIC.
_AMERICA._
An Old Civilization in a New Country. -- Old Methods in a New System
of Schools. -- Sordid Views of Education. -- The highest Aim
Money-getting. -- Herbert Spencer on the English Schools. -- Same
Defects in the American Schools. -- Maxims of Selfishness. -- The
Cultivation of Avarice. -- Political Incongruities. -- Negroes
escaping from Slavery called Fugitives from Justice. -- The Results of
Subjective Educational Processes. -- Climatic Influences alone saved
America from becoming a Slave Empire. -- Illiteracy. -- Abnormal
Growth of Cities. -- Failure of Justice. -- Defects of Education shown
in Reckless and Corrupt Legislation. -- Waste of an Empire of Public
Land. -- Henry D. Lloyd’s History of Congressional Land Grants. -- The
Growth and Power of Corporations. -- The Origin of large Fortunes,
Speculations. -- Old Social Forces producing old Social Evils. --
Still America is the Hope of the World. -- The Right of Suffrage in
the United States justifies the Sentiment of Patriotism. -- Let
Suffrage be made Intelligent and Virtuous, and all Social Evils will
yield to it; and all the Wealth of the Country is subject to the Draft
of the Ballot for Education. -- The Hope of Social Reform depends upon
a complete Educational Revolution.
The discovery of America startled Europe. It was a great blow to
prevailing dogmatisms. It upset many learned (?) theories. It swept away
patristic geography. It completed the figure of the earth, rendering it
susceptible of intelligent study. The advantages of such investigation
accrued to man, to a degree, before the social and civil life of America
began. In the century and a quarter which elapsed between the landing of
Columbus and that of the Pilgrims, on these shores, considerable social
and political progress was made in Europe, and especially in England.
From the turbulent scenes of the reigns of James I. and Charles I.,
which eventuated in the Cromwellian rebellion and victory of the
Commons, the Pilgrims escaped. They not only bore with them, to the new
continent, the impress of the long struggle for liberty waged by the
English people, but they were, in a certain sense, the product of the
progress of all the ages. But they constituted only a small part of the
column of immigrants. Detachments of the Cavaliers came also, and
Germans, Frenchmen, and Irishmen came with them.
The discovery of America was a sort of new creation,[91] but its almost
virgin soil was destined to become the home of an old civilization. From
all the nationalities of the Old World the New World was to be peopled.
The ambitious, the restless, the adventurous, the enterprising, and the
hardy of every tongue, were gradually to assemble in the new field of
action. The manner in which they treated the natives of the new country,
both north and south, showed their origin and their training. Their
determination to conquer and hold the new territory was but thinly
disguised. Their descent upon the Atlantic coast was not the exact
counterpart of that of Cæsar upon the coast of Britain, but it was the
same in spirit; and the active trade in slaves which soon sprang up, and
which was thereafter vigorously prosecuted for two hundred years, showed
the taint of savagery--the impress of Roman cruelty, rapacity, and
injustice.
[91] “The discovery of America is the greatest event which has ever
taken place in this world of ours, one half of which had hitherto been
unknown to the other. All that until now appeared extraordinary seems
to disappear before this sort of new creation.”--Voltaire.
It is evident that in its most important feature--the formation of
character--education had made little if any progress at the time of the
organization of civil society in America. The democratic idea was not
new. It found expression in every form during the struggles of Greece
and Rome, and the revival of learning had led to the discussion of
governmental questions in the light of history. Besides, the reformation
of Luther had opened the way to the last analysis of dissent in the
person of Roger Williams, who asserted the right of absolute freedom of
thought and speech. Of the religious right of private judgment the
political right of an equal voice in public affairs is the corollary.
Hence, that the Puritans should establish the town organizations so
justly lauded by M. Tocqueville was quite logical.[92] Nor was the
public-school system less logical; all citizens being members of the
government, all children must be prepared for the duties of citizenship.
But unfortunately the old system of education was put into the new
schools, as the old civilizations had been transferred to the new
country. The system of education under which the kings and ruling
classes of England and of the continent of Europe were trained to
selfishness, cruelty, and injustice, was heedlessly adopted in the
schools of New England, which became the models of schools throughout
the country.
[92] “Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to
science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how
to use and how to enjoy it.... The township institutions of New
England form a complete and regular whole; they are old; they have the
support of the laws, and the still stronger support of the manners of
the community, over which they exercise a prodigious
influence.”--“Democracy in America,” Vol. I., p. 76. By Alexis De
Tocqueville. Boston: John Allyn, 1876.
The popular idea in regard to the schools was (1) that they fitted their
pupils for the duties of citizenship, or, more properly, for the art of
governing, and (2) that they taught the art of getting on in the world;
and getting on in the world was interpreted to mean getting and keeping
money. That this sordid view of education was generally held in the
rural districts of New England is shown by the fact that any culture
beyond a limited and imperfect knowledge of reading, writing, and
arithmetic was regarded as superfluous. Not even the rudiments of either
the sciences or the arts were imparted, and yet it is only through a
knowledge of the sciences and the arts that progress in civilization is
made. The early settlers of New England devised a new system of schools,
but they imported into them an old system of education, the Greco-Roman
subjective system, introduced into England with the revival of learning.
Of this system Mr. Herbert Spencer says, “Had there been no teaching but
such as is given in our public schools, England would now be what it was
in feudal times.” And he adds:
“The vital knowledge, that by which we have grown as a nation to what we
are, and which now underlies our whole existence, is a knowledge that
has got itself taught in nooks and corners, while the ordained agencies
for teaching have been mumbling little else but dead formulas.”[93]
[93] “That which our school courses leave almost entirely out, we thus
find to be that which most nearly concerns the business of life. All
our industries would cease were it not for that information which men
begin to acquire as they best may after their education is said to be
finished.”--“Education,” p. 54. By Herbert Spencer. New York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1883.
But these are merely negative effects of subjective methods of
education. The positive evil effect of them is selfishness, the sum of
all villanies. Under the new system of schools--schools for all--the old
philosophy of life flourished. Under the name of prudence, selfishness
was deified. The maxim of Herbert--“Help thyself and God will help
thee”--was reproduced by Franklin in a hundred forms. The child was
taught, not that “The half is more than the whole,” but that “In the
race of life the devil takes the hindmost.”
Thus greed and avarice were cultivated to the sacrifice of honesty.
Calling selfishness prudence led to confounding right and wrong--freedom
and slavery. Hence we have the Declaration of Independence containing
the lofty sentiment, “All men are created equal,” and the Constitution
throwing the shield of its protection over human bondage. A false system
of education led to political incongruities of the grossest character,
as, in the preamble to the Constitution, the declaration of its high
purpose--to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty--and
in the body of the instrument a guaranty of the slave-trade for
twenty-five years, and a compact that it should be the duty of the
national army to shoot rebellious slaves, and the duty of free citizens,
of the free States, to hunt down escaping slaves and surrender them to
their owners in the slave States.
The failure of the prevailing system of education to promote rectitude
and right thinking was so complete that negroes escaping from slavery
were called “fugitives from justice!” Its failure was so complete that
the very streets of Boston in which patriots had struggled to the death
in the cause of liberty now echoed the groans of the slave, and
resounded with the clank of his chains. Its failure was so complete that
in Faneuil Hall, the cradle of liberty, slavery was justified. Its
failure was so complete that a senator, for daring to characterize
slavery as barbaric, was stricken down and beaten with a club, until he
lay helpless in a pool of blood on the floor of the legislative hall of
the great, free republic.
These are characteristics of the early civilizations, the civilizations
of Greece and Rome. They are the product of selfishness, and they show
that subjective educational processes--processes which proceed from the
abstract to the concrete, thus violating the natural law of
investigation--produce the same effects in the nineteenth century as
they did in the first century.
Ethically, slavery was tried only by the test of self-interest. In the
North, as in Europe, it was not profitable, and it faded away; in the
South, in the cotton and rice fields, it was thought to be profitable,
and it spread and flourished. That the opposition to slavery, at the
North, did not grow out of education in the schools, is evident, because
the sons of the Southern ruling class were educated in the high schools
and colleges of the North; but they became, notwithstanding such
training, almost to a man, slavery propagandists. The heinousness of
slavery was perceptible only to those who had no personal interest in
its perpetuation. It is plain that the effect of the education of the
schools upon the youth of the country was to make them callous to the
common impressions of right and wrong; in a word, to render them
thoroughly selfish.
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, if slavery had been as
profitable at the North as it was at the South, it would have been
perpetuated, and would have poisoned the infant civilization of America
as that of Rome was vitiated and destroyed. Assuming the truth of this
hypothesis, climate conditions, not education, saved this continent
from the scourge of slavery. To the fact that a large part of the
territory of the United States is situated in the temperate zone we owe
the elimination of slavery from the social problem.
Existing social conditions in the United States do not differ materially
from those of the chief countries of Europe. We have only a small
standing army; but the sole great question which divided the people
during the first hundred years of our political existence--slavery--had
to be settled as such questions have been settled from the beginning of
history, as savages settle all questions--by violence, by an appeal to
the logic of brute force.
Our government differs from the governments of Europe both in principle
and form, but the governmental influence is only one of many influences
which unite to mould social habits. The democratic principle, adopted as
the foundation of our political institutions, has not served to
counteract the tendency to the formation of social class distinctions.
The people lack the wisdom, or the virtue, or both, to insist upon the
first prerequisite to even an approximation to social equality, namely,
universal education. Of our population of fifty millions, five millions
of persons, ten years old and over, are unable to read, and six millions
are unable to write. In the last census decade we made the paltry gain
of three per cent, in intelligence, but in 1880 we had six hundred
thousand more illiterates than in 1870. Nearly two millions of the legal
voters in the United States are illiterates. Every sixth man who offers
his ballot at the polls is unable to write his name. Under such
circumstances class distinctions of the most pronounced type are
inevitable.
The tendency to the concentration of populations in cities in the
United States is not less decided than it is in the countries of Europe.
In 1820 the population of our cities constituted less than one-twentieth
of the whole population of the country, but in 1880 it constituted more
than one-fifth of the whole.
Cities have always been the chief source of societary disturbances. In
the worst days of the Roman Empire tranquillity and prosperity reigned
in many of the distant provinces. While at the city of Rome “every kind
of vice paraded itself with revolting cynicism,” in the provinces “there
was a middle class in which good-nature, conjugal fidelity, probity, and
the domestic virtues were generally practised.”
Of one of the youngest large cities in the United States the late
superintendent of a Training School for Waifs says, “Never in the
history of this city has infant wretchedness stalked forth in such
multiplied and such humiliating forms. It is hard to suppress the
conviction that even Pagan Rome, in the corrupt age of Augustus, did not
witness a more rapid and frightful declension in morals than that which
can to-day be found in the city of Chicago.”
The most graphic description ever given of a waif came from the lips of
John Morrissey.[94] He said of himself,
“I was, at the age of seven years, thrown a waif upon the streets of
Dublin. I slept in alleys and under sidewalks. I disputed with other
waifs the possession of a crust. We fought like young savages for the
garbage that fell from the basket of the scullion. The strongest won
and satisfied the cravings of hunger; the weakest starved. I had no idea
that anything was to be gained by other means than brute force. Hence my
code of moral and political ethics--the strongest man is the best man. I
became a pugilist.”
[94] A noted pugilist, proprietor of gambling-houses in New York City
and at Saratoga Springs, and a politician who represented a New York
City district in Congress.
The substantial citizen who passes the street waif with contempt should
reflect that ten or a dozen years later he will meet him, a full-grown
man, at the polls, still clothed in rags, perhaps, but his peer in all
the rights of citizenship. It was the unfortunates of the dark alleys
and noxious streets of New York--the waifs, the savages of the John
Morrissey type--that made Tweedism[95] possible, that made robbery in
the name of law possible, that made taxation the equivalent of
confiscation in that city.
[95] For an account of the career of William Marcy Tweed, see “The
American Cyclopædia,” Vol. XVI, p. 85. New York: D. Appleton & Co.,
1881.
Mr. Charles Dickens, in “Bleak House,” in the course of a pen-picture of
a wretched quarter of London, under the name of “Tom-all-alones,” shows
how ignorance, poverty, and vice react upon society. He says, “There is
not an atom of Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in
which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an
ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing but shall
work its retribution through every order of society, up to the proudest
of the proud, and to the highest of the high.”
The presence of the poison is already shown in the failure of justice.
These waifs, grown to man’s estate, but destitute of education and moral
principle, wielding the power of the ballot, desecrate the jury-room
with their vile presence, and tug at the skirts of sheriffs,
prosecuting officers, and judges, and notorious criminals escape
punishment! So grievous has the abuse become that Judge Lynch has opened
his summary, awful court in almost every State of the Union.
To say that this class menaces the government with destruction is to
state it mildly. In every case of the failure of justice the government
is in part subverted; for when crime goes unpunished, the law, violated
in that particular instance, becomes a dead letter; and when lynching
shall have become the rule, and the execution of the law the exception,
government by law will have ceased to exist--it will have given way to
government by force. Then the army will be invoked to shoot down the men
for whose education the law failed to provide, in every city of the
land, as it was invoked in Pittsburg in 1877.
What are we doing to avert this danger which threatens our institutions?
With the exception of here and there a weak effort on the part of a few
humanitarians, as in the training school referred to, we are leaving
hundreds of thousands of waifs to develop into savages, and, what is
worse, savages with the power to tax civilized people! We have a system
of public schools into which such children as choose may enter to a
certain limit, remain as long as they please, and depart when they
please. But there are thousands of children in every large city who
could not enter if they would, and who are not compelled to receive the
civilizing benefits of education, and who hence join the army of waifs
and study the art of savagery; and, as has been remarked, they go to
swell the ranks of a populace as depraved as that which in Rome cried
for “bread and circuses!” and sacked the city while it was in flames.
The defective, not to say vicious character of our system of education,
is shown by the reckless course of our legislators on the subject of the
disposition of the public domain. William the Conqueror, conceiving that
any social revolution is incomplete until it disturbs the proprietorship
of land, confiscated the entire landed estates of England, and conferred
what remained of the proprietary, after reservations in the Crown, upon
his retainers, the Normans. Eight hundred years have elapsed since the
issue of William’s land-tenure edict, but it still remains the
controlling feature of the British Constitution. It has compelled the
deportation of millions of Englishmen; it has reduced the masses of
Scotland to a grinding poverty, and converted their country into
hunting-grounds for the amusement of the landlord class; it has
depopulated Ireland, and exasperated almost to madness the remnant of
her people.
But we have failed to profit by the example of England. Our legislators
have been blind to the lessons of history, or they have been corrupt.
They have been ignorant of political and social laws, or they have been
wanting in rectitude. In the period of thirty years, ended in 1880,
Congress gave to railway corporations over 240,000 square miles, or
154,067,553 acres, of the best public lands in the States and
Territories of the Union--an area double that of the whole kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland, including the adjacent isles.
On the 17th of March, 1883, the _Chicago Daily Tribune_ published a
history of these land grants, compiled by Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, under the
following summary:
“_The story of the dissipation of our great national inheritance--thrown
away by Congress, wasted by the Land Office, stolen by thieves. A land
monopoly worse than that of England, begotten in America. English
monopoly is in families; American monopoly is in corporations; and
corporations are the only aristocrats that have no souls, and never
die._”
The following passages from the opening paragraphs of Mr. Lloyd’s
history are reproduced here by permission of the author:
“The public are profoundly ignorant of the facts about the public land.
They know, in a dim way, that it is passing out of their hands, and that
huge monopolies are being created out of the lands which they meant
should be the inheritance of the settler. The land set apart for homes
for families has been made into empires for corporations. In the story
recited below, every element of human fault and fraud will be seen to
have been at work in the spoliation of the land of the people. Congress
has been extravagant and has failed to act when part of the results of
its extravagance might have been saved. The Land Office has been
inadequately equipped by Congress, and has on its own account been
careless, dishonest, and traitorous to the interests of the people. It
has been wax in the hands of the great railroad corporations, but
double-edged steel in the side of the poor settler. It has overruled
decisions of the Supreme Court and nullified acts of Congress to betray
its trust and enrich the railroads, but has refused even to exercise its
discretion when the home of a settler, held by a righteous title, was to
be confiscated at the demand of corporate greed. The niggardliness of
Congress makes clerks, on salaries of twelve hundred to eighteen hundred
dollars a year, untrained in the law, knowing nothing of the rules of
evidence, judges of the law and facts in cases involving millions of
dollars and thousands of homes. There is no worse chapter in the
history of government than the facts we have to give showing the
deliberate and heartless evictions of the European immigrant and the
American settler in order to give their farms to covetous corporations.
The land-grant roads have had millions of acres granted them by the Land
Office in excess of the grants by Congress. The whole story is summed up
in the recent remark of one who had thoroughly investigated the
subject--that the history of the management of the land-grant roads by
the Land Office is a history of the management of the Land Office by the
railroads.
“No chapter in this story will be found of more sombre interest than the
statements made as to the Supreme Court by the Senate Committee on
Public Lands, in a report submitted by Senator Van Wyck recommending a
bill to compel the railroads to pay taxes on their lands. Its decisions
as to the titles of the railroads and the settlers to the lands, like
those of a weathercock, have pointed the way the corporation blew its
breath.”
The summary of Mr. Lloyd’s paper by the editor of the _Tribune_, as a
preface to its publication, and the foregoing characterization of the
acts of Congress, of the Land Office, and of the Supreme Court, by Mr.
Lloyd, are fully justified by the alleged facts marshalled in the body
of the sketch; and these allegations, after a year and a half of public
scrutiny, stand unchallenged.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more reckless series of
legislative acts than those through which the public domain in the
United States has been squandered; and they are rendered either ignorant
or vicious by the fact that in the vast empire surrendered almost
totally without consideration, each legislator, in common with the
people by and for whom he was deputed to act, had a personal interest.
Through this series of acts of Congress the public domain was rudely
wrested from its rightful owners, the people; the abnormal growth of
corporate power unduly promoted, and a tendency to the concentration, in
a few hands, of the landed estates of the country fostered.
The social and economic effects of this land legislation must be very
great and far-reaching. Of the effects of the concentration of landed
estates in a few hands we need not speak; they are sufficiently plain in
England, Scotland, and Ireland.[96] But great corporations are a
creation of yesterday; they are the product of steam. The railway, the
factory, the mine of iron or coal, the furnace, the foundery, and the
forge--these vast interests, chartered and endowed with certain
muniments of sovereignty, are, as property, almost as indestructible as
landed estates protected by the law of primogeniture. Men are trained
from generation to generation to the care and conduct of them, and hence
they are far less liable to waste and dispersion than private estates,
which, in transmission, may be subjected to disastrous changes of
management. Being also enterprises of a semi-public character, the
public is bound, as well as their owners, to see to their preservation.
[96] “The more essential and important consideration is this--that
whenever the few rapidly accumulate excessive wealth, the many must,
necessarily, become comparatively poorer.... In every case in which we
have traced out the efficient causes of the present depression we have
found it to originate in customs, laws, or modes of action which are
ethically unsound, if not positively immoral. Wars and excessive war
armaments, loans to despots or for war purposes, the accumulation of
vast wealth by individuals, excessive speculation, adulteration of
manufactured goods, and, lastly, _our bad land system_, with its
insecurity of tenure, excessive rents, confiscation of tenants’
property, its common enclosures, evictions, and depopulation of the
rural districts--all come under this category.”--“Bad Times,” pp. 65,
117. By Alfred Russel Wallace, LL.D. London: Macmillan & Co., 1885.
It is to a small number of the greatest of these great companies that
Congress has given an empire of land in the West--an area double that
owned by the lords of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In the railway
proprietor of the United States the two great elements of power are
united--steam and land. It needs no argument to show that only the
nation can control the proprietor of both the land and the railway--the
sole means of reaching a market for the products of the land. The
appellative--kingship--to the railway proprietor is not a misnomer. He
is a real potentate, both by virtue of the multitudes of men over whom
he rules autocratically, and of the magnitude of the revenue he wields.
Presidents come and go, but he remains. Legislators investigate him and
report upon him, but they are met by a flat denial of the authority of
either State or nation to interfere with his “vested rights.” He claims
the right of himself and associates to control, absolutely, the internal
commerce of the country; and this claim involves the pretence that they
may confiscate merchandise seeking a market by charging, for carriage,
the full value of the thing transported.
The railway and the factory, the two great products of steam, are new
factors in the social problem, and to properly control them will require
new wisdom; and the new wisdom is not to be drawn from old educational
fountains.
State legislation has been as vicious as that of the nation. The people
of nearly every State in the Union have been made the victims of great
frauds and gross ignorance at the hands of their representatives. In
nearly every State syndicates have been formed with the design of
securing valuable franchises without consideration; and to effectuate
such designs bribery has been freely and successfully resorted to in a
vast number of cases. But rarely has the guilty agent of the guilty
syndicate, or the perjured, purchased legislator been brought to
justice, notwithstanding the fact that exposure has often followed the
iniquity.
Evidence of the essentially European character of the American
civilization is afforded by the prevalence of speculation.[E30] In Wall
Street, New York, on the Board of Trade, Chicago, and on the exchanges
of all large cities speculation rages. The real transactions of those
business marts are very small, indeed, as compared with the transactions
of a speculative character. On the New York Cotton Exchange the
speculative trades in “futures” are thirty times more than the cotton
sales. On the Chicago Board of Trade the speculative trades in “futures”
are fifteen times more than the sales of grain and provisions, and so of
the exchanges of all other large cities. To support these speculative
operations fresh money is required to be constantly poured into the
pool, and it is drawn from every class in the community. Very little of
the “fresh money” is ever returned. Most of it remains in the hands of
the pool managers, of those whose profession it is to manipulate the
markets. Thus the fever of speculation extends from centre to
circumference of the country, stimulating bad passions, creating
distaste for labor, relieving the countryman of his surplus, and
increasing the already overgrown fortune of the city operator. A writer
on current topics, discussing this subject, says, “Put your finger on
one of our great fortunes, and nine times out of ten you will feel
underneath it the cold heart of some one who has mined on the San
Francisco Stock Exchange, or packed pork on the Chicago Board of Trade,
or built railroads in Wall Street.”[97]
[97] “America does not now suffer from this cause [standing armies],
but nowhere in the world have colossal fortunes, rabid speculation,
and great monopolies reached so portentous a magnitude, or exerted so
pernicious an influence.”--“Bad Times,” p. 80. By Alfred Russel
Wallace, LL.D. London: Macmillan & Co,. 1885.
A sufficient number of the salient features of American civilization
have been brought under review to show that the new continent has not
borne new social fruits. Under extremely favorable physical
conditions--a country of vast resources, a wide range of climates, and a
soil of great fertility--we planted old social forces, and old social
evils are in process of rapid development. We are transplanted
Europeans, controlled by European mental and moral habitudes. And the
virile force, evoked by the splendid physical opportunities of a vast
new country, so intensifies the struggle for wealth and power, that
European social abuses are not only reproduced, but sometimes
exaggerated in this land of boasted equal political rights.
But notwithstanding the fact that social tendencies in America seem to
be similar to those of Europe, it is upon America alone that the eyes of
mankind rest with an expression of ardent hopefulness. Nor is this hope
destitute of a basis of rationality. It is in the United States, for the
first time in all the ages, that a good reason can be given for
indulging the sentiment of patriotism. Love of country here is a due
appreciation of the value of the right of suffrage. The private soldier
who goes forth to fight the battles of the United States is a man and
citizen, and upon his return from the field he may, with the ballot,
devote to the education of his children a share of the estate of the
army contractor who amassed a fortune while he defended the country. All
the property in the United States, whether honestly or dishonestly
acquired, is subject to the order of the ballot of the citizen. It may
be taken for war purposes, and it may be taken for educational purposes.
In the universality of the right of suffrage lies the power of
correcting all social evils. It is through the right of suffrage that
the wrongs inflicted upon a too patient people by corrupt and ignorant
legislation may be ultimately righted. By the suffrages of the people
the tax bill is voted; and it is through the tax bill that the vast
estates of corporations and individuals, whether obtained by dishonest
practices or not, may be made to contribute to the thorough education of
all the children of the country. And it is through the sentiment of
patriotism thus inspired that the right of universal suffrage in the
United States is destined to preservation forever.
The late proposition to limit suffrage in the city of New York is
explainable only on the theory put forth in this chapter, that our
civilization is the product of European ideas--that we are Europeans in
disguise. On any other hypothesis it would be amazing. It is even now
sufficiently startling that the proposition to restrict suffrage should
precede the proposition to make education universal by making it
compulsory, and to purge it of its glaring defects. Every attempt to
restrict the right of suffrage in the United States will, however, fail.
The right of self-government can be taken from the American people only
by force. The American citizen will not vote away his right to vote, as
the careless Greek sold his freedom, and as the Chinaman sells his life.
That American social abuses do not spring from free suffrage is evident,
because similar abuses exist in countries where the masses have little
or no share in the government. Social evils are the product of defective
education. So long as European educational methods prevail in this
country, so long European social abuses will characterize our
civilization. Our education is scant in quantity and poor in quality;
hence the standard of the suffrage is lowered by the presence of
ignorance and depravity. But when the suffrage shall be better informed,
it will be more honest; and when it shall have become more honest and
more intelligent, it will have gained the power to grapple with social
abuses.
Such examination of history as we have been able to make fails to
disclose any radical change in educational methods for three thousand
years. The charge of Mr. Herbert Spencer against the schools of England,
to wit, “That which our school courses leave almost entirely out we thus
find to be that which most nearly concerns the business of life”--this
charge applies with almost as much force to the schools of the United
States as to the Greek and Roman schools of rhetoric and logic. Bacon’s
aphorism--“Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate
familiarity betwixt the mind and things”--is two hundred and fifty years
old, but it has as yet exerted scarcely an appreciable influence upon
the methods of our public schools. We still reverse the natural order of
investigation proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, thus
lumbering the mind of the student with trash which must be removed as a
preliminary to the first step in the real work of education. We still
impart a knowledge of words instead of a knowledge of things; we still
ignore art, notwithstanding the fact that it is through art alone that
education touches human life. We still inculcate contempt of labor, and
teach the student how to “make his way in the world” by his wits, rather
than by giving an equivalent for what he shall receive; and, worst of
all, we continue, through subjective processes of thought, to charge the
mind with selfishness, the essence of depravity.
Meantime, social problems press for a solution, a solution here and now.
Our social problems cannot be settled as those of Europe have been, for
two hundred years, by emigration. We have no Columbus, and if we had
such an explorer, there is no new hemisphere for him to discover. The
lesson of all history is, that selfish people cannot dwell together in
unity. The struggle to secure more than a fair share of the products of
the labor of all is sure to end in a quarrel; the quarrel ends in a
revolution, and the revolution, under the glare of flames, drowns in
blood the records of civilization. But in America the man must live with
his fellows. As Mr. Henry D. Lloyd well says, in “Lords of Industry,”
“Our young men can no longer go West; they must go up or down. Not new
land, but new virtue must be the outlet for the future. Our halt at the
shores of the Pacific is a much more serious affair than that which
brought our ancestors to a pause before the barriers of the Atlantic,
and compelled them to practise living together for a few hundred years.
We cannot hereafter, as in the past, recover freedom by going to the
prairies; we must find it in the society of the good.” [98]
[98] _North American Review_, June, 1884, p. 552.
If we are to find freedom only in the society of the good, we must
create such a society--a society free from selfishness; for to the
stability of society public spirit is essential, and with a pure public
spirit selfishness is at war. Hence, in a system of education like the
prevailing one, which promotes selfishness, the germs of social
disintegration are present, and, from the beginning, the end may with
absolute certainty be predicted. It follows that any hope of social
reform is wholly irrational that does not spring from the postulate of a
complete educational revolution.
[E30] The speculative habit has so debauched public sentiment in
England and America that distinguished authors hesitate not to give
free expression to a feeling of contempt for the ancients because of
their failure to engage in colossal swindling operations, as witness
the following:
“The charges of fraud [in the Attic courts], which are many, are of
the vulgarest and simplest kind, depending upon violence, on false
swearing, and upon evading judgment by legal devices. There is not a
single case of any large or complicated swindling, such as is
exhibited by the genius of modern English and American speculators.
There is not even such ingenuity as was shown by Verres in his
government of Sicily to be found among the clever Athenians.”--“Social
Life in Greece,” p. 408. By the Rev. J. P. Mahaffy, F.T.C.D. London:
Macmillan & Co., 1883.
[E31] “On all hands of us, there is the announcement, audible enough,
that the Old Empire of Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long
been, is no reason for its continuing to be. The things which have
been are fallen into decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses
of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are no longer capable of
living at all by the things which have been. When millions of men can
no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and ‘the
third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate
potatoes,’ the things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter
themselves!”--“Lectures on Heroes,” p. 157. By Thomas Carlyle. Chapman
& Hall’s People’s Edition.
“Change the sources of a river, and you will change it throughout its
whole course; change the education of a people, and you will alter
their character and their manners:”--“Studies of Nature,” Vol. II., p.
575. By Bernardin St. Pierre. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846.