Thus it has been attempted, we fear with too much prolixity and
repetition, to describe the evils attendant on a neglected state of the
minds of the people. The representation does not comprehend all those even
of magnitude and prominence; but it displays that portion of them which is
the most serious and calamitous, as being the effect which the people's
ignorance has on their moral and religious interests. And we think no one
who has attentively surveyed the state and character of the lower orders
of the community, in this country, will impute exaggeration to the
picture. It is rather to be feared that the reality is of still darker
shade; and that a more strikingly gloomy exhibition might be formed, by
such a process as the following:--That a certain number of the most
observant of the philanthropic persons, who have had most intercourse with
the classes in question, for the purposes of instruction, charitable aid,
or perhaps of furnishing employment, should relate the most characteristic
circumstances and anecdotes within their own experience, illustrative of
this mental and moral condition; and that these should be arranged,
without any comment, under the respective heads of the preceding sketch,
or of a more comprehensive enumeration. Each of them might repeat, in so
many words, the most notable things he has heard uttered as disclosing the
notions entertained of the Deity, or any part of religion; or those which
have been formed of the ground and extent of duty and accountableness; or
the imaginations respecting the termination of life, and a future
retribution. They might relate the judgments they have heard pronounced on
characters and particular modes of conduct; on important events in the
world; on anything, in short, which may afford a test of the quality and
compass of uncultivated thought. Let the recital include both the
expressions of individual conception, and those of the most current maxims
and common-places; and let them be the sayings of persons in health, and
of those languishing and dying. Then let there be produced a numerous
assortment of characteristic samples of practical conduct; conduct not
simply proceeding, in a general way, from wrong disposition, but bearing
the special marks of the cast and direction which that disposition takes
through extreme ignorance: samples of action that is wrong because the
actor cannot think right, or does not think at all. The assemblage of
things thus recounted, when the actual circumstances were also added of
the wretchedness corresponding and inseparable, would constitute such an
exhibition of fact, as any description of those evils in general terms
would incur the charge of rhetorical excesses in attempting to rival. We
can well imagine that some of these persons, of large experience, may have
accompanied us through the foregoing series of illustrations, with a
feeling that they could have displayed the subject with a far more
striking prominence.
And now again the mortifying reflection comes on us, that all this is the
description of too probably the major part of the people of our own
nation. Of this nation, the theme of so many lofty strains of panegyric;
of this nation, stretching forth its powers in ambitious enterprise, with
infinite pride and cost, to all parts of the globe;--just as if a family
were seen eagerly intent on making some new appropriation, or going out to
maintain some competition or feud with its neighbors, or mixing perhaps in
the strife of athletic games, or drunken frays, at the very time that
several of its members are lying dead in the house. So that the fame of
the nation resounded, and its power made itself felt, in every clime, it
was not worth a consideration that a vast proportion of its people were
systematically consigned, through ignorance and the irreligion and
depravity inseparable from it, to a wretchedness on which that fame was
the bitterest satire. It is matter for never-ending amazement, that during
one generation after another, the presiding wisdom in this chief of
Christian and Protestant States, should have thrown out the living
strength of that state into almost every mode of agency under heaven,
rather than that of promoting the state itself to the condition of a happy
community of cultivated beings. What stupendous infatuation, what
disastrous ascendency of the Power of Darkness, that this energy should
have been sent forth to pervade all parts of the world in quest of
objects, to inspirit and accomplish innumerable projects, political and
military, and to lavish itself, even to exhaustion and fainting at its
vital source, on every alien interest; while here at home, so large a part
of the social body was in a moral and intellectual sense dying and
putrefying over the land. And it was thus perishing for want of the
vivifying principle of knowledge, which one-fifth part of this mighty
amount of exertion would have been sufficient to diffuse into every corner
and cottage in the island. Within its circuit, a countless multitude were
seen passing away their mortal existence little better, in any view, than
mere sentient shapes of matter, and by their depravity immeasurably worse;
and yet this hideous fact had not the weight of the very dust of the
balance, in the deliberation whether a grand exertion of the national
vigor and resource could have any object so worthy, (with God for the
Judge,) as some scheme of foreign aggrandizement, some interference in
remote quarrels, an avengement by anticipation of wrongs pretended to be
foreseen, or the obstinate prosecution of some fatal career, begun in the
very levity of pride, by a decision in which some perverse individual or
party in ascendency had the influence to obtain a corrupt, deluded, or
forced concurrence.
The national _honor_, perhaps, would be alleged, in a certain matter of
punctilio, for the necessity of undertakings of incalculable consumption,
by men who could see no national _disgrace_ in the circumstance that
several millions of the persons composing the nation could not read the
ten commandments. Or the national _safety_ has been pleaded to a similar
purpose, with a rant or a gravity of patriotic phrases, upon the
appearance of some slight threatening symptoms; and the wise men so
pleading, would have scouted as the very madness of fanaticism any
dissuasion that should have advised,--"Do you, instead, apply your best
efforts, and the nation's means, to raise the barbarous population from
their ignorance and debasement, and you really may venture some little
trust in Divine Providence for the nation's safety meanwhile."
If a contemplative and religious man, looking back through little more
than a century, were enabled to take, with an adequate comprehension of
intellect, the sum and value of so much of the astonishing course of the
national exertions of this country as the Supreme Judge has put to the
criminal account of pride and ambition; and if he could then place in
contrast to the transactions on which that mighty amount has been
expended, a sober estimate of what so much exerted vigor _might_ have
accomplished for the intellectual and moral exaltation of the people, it
could not be without an emotion of horror that he would say, Who is to be
accountable, who _has been_ accountable, for this difference? He would no
longer wonder at any plagues and judgments which may have been inflicted
on such a state. And he would solemnly adjure all those, especially, who
profess in a peculiar manner to feel the power of the Christian Religion,
to beware how they implicate themselves, by avowed or even implied
approbation, in what must be a matter of fearful account before the
highest tribunal. If some such persons, of great merit and influence,
honored performers of valuable public services in certain departments,
have habitually given, in a public capacity, this approbation, he would
urge it on their consciences, in the evening of life, to consider whether,
in the prospect of that tribunal, they have not one duty yet to
perform,--to throw off from their minds the servility to party
associations, to estimate as Christians, about to retire from the scene,
the actual effects on this nation of a policy which might have been nearly
the same if Christianity had been extinct; and then to record a solemn,
recanting, final protest against a system to which they have concurred in
the profane policy of degrading that religion itself into a party.
Any reference made to such a prospect implies, that there is attributed to
those who can feel its seriousness a state of mind perfectly unknown to
the generality of what are called public men. For it is notorious that, to
the mere working politician, there is nothing on earth that sounds so idly
or so ludicrously as a reference to a judgment elsewhere and hereafter, to
which the policy and transactions of statesmen are to be carried. If the
Divine jurisdiction would yield to contract its comprehension, and retire
from all the ground over which a practical infidelity heedlessly
disregards or deliberately rejects it, how large a province it would leave
free! If it be assumed that the province of national affairs _is_ so left
free, on the pretence that they _cannot_ be transacted in faithful
conformity to the Christian standard, that plea is reserved to be tried in
the great account, when the responsibility for them shall be charged. For
assuredly there will be persons found, to be summoned forth as accountable
for that conduct of states which we are contemplating. Such a moral agency
could not throw off its responsibility into the air, to be dissipated and
lost, like the black smoke of forges or volcanoes. This one grand thing
(the improvement of the people) left undone, while a thousand arduous
things have been done or strenuously endeavored, cannot be less than an
awful charge _somewhere_. And where?--but on all who have voluntarily
concurred and co-operated in systems and schemes, which could deliberately
put _such_ a thing last? Last! nay, not even that; for they have, till
recently, as we have seen, thrown it almost wholly out of consideration. A
long succession of men invested with ample power are gone to this audit.
How many of those who come after them will choose to proceed on the same
principles, and meet the same award?
We were supposing a thoughtful man to draw out to his view a parallel and
contrast, exhibiting, on the one side, the series of objects on which,
during several ages, an enormous exertion of the national energy has been
directed; and on the other, those improvements of the people which might
have been effected by so much of that exertion as he deems to have been
worse than wasted. In this process, he might often be inclined to single
out particular parts in the actual series, to be put in special contrast
over against the possibilities on the opposite line. For example; there
may occur to his view some inconsiderable island, the haunt of fatal
diseases, and rendered productive by means involving the most flagrant
iniquity; an iniquity which it avenges by opening a premature grave for
many of his countrymen, and by being a moral corrupter of the rest. Such
an infested spot, nevertheless, may have been one of the most material
objects of a widely destructive war, which has in effect sunk incalculable
treasure in the sea, and in the sands, ditches, and fields of
plague-infested shores; with a dreadful sacrifice of blood, life, and all
the best moral feelings and habits. Its possession, perhaps, was the chief
prize and triumph of all the grand exertion, the equivalent for all the
cost, misery, and crime.
Or there may occur to him the name of some fortress, in a less remote
region, where the Christian nations seem to have vied with one another
which of them should deposit the greatest number of victims, securely kept
in the charge of death, to rise and testify for them, at the last day, how
much they have been governed by the peaceful spirit of their professed
religion. He reads that his countrymen, conjoined with others, have
battled round this fortress, wasting the vicinity, but richly manuring the
soil with blood. They have co-operated in hurling upon the abodes of
thousands of inhabitants within its walls, a thunder and lightning
incomparably more destructive than those of nature; and have put fire and
earthquake under the fortifications; shouting, "to make the welkin ring,"
at sight of the consequent ruin and chasm, which have opened an entrance
for hostile rage, or compelled an immediate submission, if, indeed, it
would then be accepted to disappoint that rage of its horrible
consummation. They have taken the place,--and they have surrendered it.
The next year perhaps they have taken it again; to be again at last given
up, on compulsion or in compromise, to the very same party to which it had
belonged previously to all this destructive commotion. The operations in
this local and very narrow portion of the grand affray of monarchies, he
may calculate to have cost his country as much as the amount earned by the
toils of half the life of all the inhabitants of one of its populous
towns; setting aside from his view the more portentous part of the
account,--the carnage, the crimes, and the devastation perpetrated on the
foreign tract, the place of abode of people who had little interest in the
contest, and no power to prevent it. And why was all this? He may not be
able to divest himself of the principles that should rule the judgment of
a moralist and a Christian, in order to think like a statesman; and
therefore may find no better reason than that, when despots would quarrel,
Britain must fancy itself called upon to take the occasion to prove itself
a great power, by bearing a high hand amidst their rivalries; or must
seize the opportunity of revenging some trivial offence of one of them;
though this should be at the expense of having the scene at home chequered
between children learning little more than how to curse, and old persons
dying without knowing how to put words together to pray.
The question may have been, in one part of the world or another, which of
two wicked individuals of the same family, competitors for sovereign
authority, should be actually invested with it, they being equal in the
qualifications and dispositions to make the worst use of it. And the
decision of such a question was worthy that England should expend what
remained of her depressed strength from previous exertions of it in some
equally meritorious cause.
Or the supposed reviewer of our national history may find, somewhere in
his retrospect, that a certain brook or swamp in a wilderness, or a stripe
of waste, or the settlement of boundaries in respect to some insignificant
traffic, was difficult of adjustment between jealous, irritated, and
mutually incursive neighbors; and therefore, national honor and interest
equally required that war should be lighted up by land and sea, through
several quarters of the globe. Or a dissension may have arisen upon the
matter of some petty tax on an article of commerce: an absolute will had
been rashly signified on the claim; pride had committed itself, and was
peremptory for persisting; and the resolution was to be prosecuted through
a wide tempest of destruction, protracted perhaps many years; and only
ending in the forced abandonment by the leading power concerned, of
infinitely more than war had been made in the determination not to forego;
and after an absolutely fathomless amount of every kind of cost, financial
and moral, in this progress to final frustration.--But there would be no
end of recounting facts of this order.
Now the comparative estimator has to set against the extended rank of such
enormities the forms of imagined good, which might, during the ages of
this retrospect, have been realized by an incomparably less exhausting
series of exertion, an exertion, indeed, continually renovating its own
resources. Imagined good, we said;--alas! the evil stands in long and
awful display on the ground of history; the hypothetical good presents
itself as a dream; with this circumstance only of difference from a dream,
that there is resting on the conscience of beings somewhere still
existing, a fearful accountableness for its not having been a reality.
For such an _island_, as we have supposed our comparer to read of, he can
look, in imagination, on a space of proportional extent in any part of his
native country, taking a district as a detached section of a general
national picture. And he can figure to himself the result, resplendent
upon this tract, of so much energy, there beneficently expended, as that
island had cost: an energy, we mean _equivalent in measure_, while put
forth in the infinitely different _mode_ of an exertion, by all
appropriate means, to improve the reason, manners, morals, and with them
the physical condition of the people. What a prevalence of intelligence,
what a delightful civility of deportment, what repression of the more
gross and obtrusive forms of vice, what domestic decorum, attentive
education of the children, appropriateness of manner, and readiness of
apprehension in attendance on public offices of religion, sense and good
order in assemblages for the assertion and exercise of civil and political
rights! All this he can imagine as the possible result.
We were supposing his attention fixed a while on the recorded operations
against some strongly fortified place, in a region marked through every
part with the traces and memorials of the often-renewed conflicts of the
Christian states. And we suppose him to make a collective estimate of all
kinds of human ability exerted around and against that particular devoted
place; an estimate which divides this off as a portion of the whole
immense quantity of exertion, expended by his country in all that region
in the campaigns of a war, or of a century's wars. He may then again
endeavor, by a rule of equivalence, to conceive the same amount of
exertion in quite another way; to imagine human forces equal in
_quantity_ to all that putting forth of strength, physical, mental, and
financial, for annoyance and destruction, expended instead, in the
operation of effecting the utmost improvement which they _could_ effect,
in the mental cultivation and the morals of the inhabitants of one large
town in his own country.
In figuring to himself the channels and instrumentality, through which
this great stream of energy might have passed into this operation, on a
detached spot of his country, he will soon have many specific means
presented to his view: schools of the most perfect appointment, in every
section and corner of the town; a system of friendly but cogent dealing
with all the people of inferior condition, relatively to the necessity of
their practical accordance to the plans of education;[Footnote: It is here
confidently presumed, that any man who looks, in a right state of his
senses, at the manner in which the children are still brought up, in many
parts of the land, will hear with contempt any hypocritical protest
against so much interference with the discretion, the liberty of
parents;--the discretion, the liberty, forsooth, of bringing up their
children a nuisance on the face of the earth.] an exceedingly copious
supply, for individual possession, of the best books of elementary
knowledge; accompanied, as we need not say, by the sacred volume; a number
of assortments of useful and pleasing books for circulation, established
under strict order, and with appointments of honorary and other rewards to
those who gave evidence of having made the best use of them; a number of
places of resort where various branches of the most generally useful and
attainable knowledge and arts should be explained and applied, by every
expedient of familiar, practical, and entertaining illustration, admitting
a degree of co-operation by those who attended to see and hear; and an
abundance of commodious places for religious instruction on the Sabbath,
where there should be wise and zealous men to impart it. Our speculator
has a right to suppose a high degree of these qualifications in his public
teachers of religion, when he is to imagine a parallel in this department
to the skill and ardor displayed in the supposed military operations. He
may add as subsidiary to such an apparatus, everything of magistracy and
municipal regulation; a police, vigilant and peremptory against every
cognizable neglect and transgression of good order; a resolute breaking up
of all haunts and rendezvous of intemperance, dishonesty and other vice;
and the best devised and administered institutions for correcting and
reclaiming those whom education had failed to preserve from such
depravity; and besides all this, there would be a great variety of
undefinable and optional activity of benevolent and intelligent men of
local influence.
Under so auspicious a combination of discipline, he will not indeed fancy,
in his transient vision, that he beholds Athens revived, with its bright
intelligence all converted to minister to morality, religion, and
happiness; but he will, in sober consistency, we think, with what is known
of the relation of cause and effect, imagine a place far surpassing any
actual town or city on earth. And let it be distinctly kept in view, that
to reduce the ideal exhibition to reality, he is not dreaming of means and
resources out of all human reach, of preternatural powers, discovered
gold-mines, grand feats of genius. He is just supposing to have been
expended, on the population of the town, a measure of exertion and means
equal, (as far as agencies in so different a form and direction can be
brought to any rule of comparative estimate) to what has been expended by
his country in investing, battering, undermining, burning, taking, and
perhaps retaking, one particular foreign town, in one or several
campaigns.
If he should perchance be sarcastically questioned, how he can allow
himself in so strange a conceit as that of supposing such a quantity of
forces concentrated to act in one exclusive spot, while the rest of the
country remained under the old course of things; or in such an absurdity
as that of fancying that _any_ quantity of those forces could effectually
raise one local section of the people eminently aloft, while continuing
surrounded and unavoidably in constant intercourse with the general mass,
remaining still sunk in degradation--he has to reply, that he is fancying
no such thing. For while he is thus converting, in imagination, the
military exertions against one foreign town, into intellectual and moral
operations on one town at home, why may he not, in similar imagination,
make a whole country correspond to a whole country? He may conceive the
incalculable amount of exertion made by his country, in martial operations
over all that wide foreign territory of which he has selected a particular
spot, to have been, on the contrary, expended in the supposed beneficent
process on the great scale of this whole nation. Then would the
hypothetical improvement in the one particular town, so far from being a
strange insulated phenomenon, absurd to be conceived as existing in
exception and total contrast to the general state of the people, be but a
specimen of that state.
He may proceed along the series of such confronted spectacles as far as
bitter mortification will let him. But he will soon be sick of this
process of comparison. And how sick will he thenceforward be, to perpetual
loathing, of the vain raptures with which an immortal and anti-Christian
patriotism can review a long history of what it will call national glory,
acquired by national energy ambitiously consuming itself in a continual
succession and unlimited extent of extraneous operations, of that kind
which has been the grand curse of the human race ever since the time of
Cain; while the one thing needful of national welfare, the very _summum
bonum_ of a state, has been regarded with contemptuous indifference.
These observations are not made on an assumption, that England could in
all cases have kept clear of implication in foreign interests, and remote
and sanguinary contests. But they are made on the assumption of what is
admitted and deplored by every thoughtful religious man, whose
understanding and moral sense are not wretchedly prostrated in homage to a
prevailing system, and chained down by a superstition that dares not
question the wisdom and probity of high national authorities and counsels.
What is so admitted and deplored by the true and Christian patriots is,
that this nation has gone to an awfully criminal extent beyond the line of
necessity; that it has been extremely prompt to find or make occasions for
appearing again, and still again, in array for the old work of waste and
death; and that the advantage possessed by the preponderating classes in
this protestant country, for being instructed (if they had cared for such
instruction) to look at these transactions in the light of religion, has
reflected a peculiar aggravation on the guilt of a policy persevered in
from age to age, in disregard of the laws of Christianity, and the warning
of accountableness to the Sovereign Judge.
These observations assume, also, that there _cannot_ be such a thing as a
nation so doomed to a necessity and duty of expending its vigor and means
in foreign enterprise, as to be habitually absolved from the duty of
raising its people from brutish ignorance. _This_ concern is a duty at all
events and to an entire certainty; is a duty imperative and absolute; and
any pretended necessity for such a direction of the national exertion as
would be, through a long succession of time, incompatible with a paramount
attention to this, would be a virtual denial of the superintendence of
Providence. It would be the same thing as to assert of an individual, that
his duties of other kinds are so many and great, as to render it
impossible for him to give a competent attention to his highest interests,
and that therefore he stands exempted from the obligations of religion.
Such as we have described has been, for ages, the degraded state of the
multitude. And such has been the indifference to it, manifested by the
superior, the refined, the ascendant portion of the community; who,
generally speaking, could see these sharers with them of the dishonored
human nature, in endless numbers around them, in the city and the field,
without its ever flashing on conscience that on them was lying a solemn
responsibility, destined to press one day with all its weight, for that
ill arrangement of the social order which abandoned these beings to an
exclusion from the sphere of rational existence. It never occurred to many
of them as a question of the smallest moment, in what manner the mind
might be living in all these bodies, if only it were there in competence
to make them efficient as machines and implements. Contented to be gazed
at, to be envied, or to be regarded as too high even for envy, and to have
the rough business of the world performed by these inhalers of the vital
air, they perhaps thought, if they reflected at all on the subject, that
the best and most privileged state of such creatures was to be in the
least possible degree morally accountable: and that therefore it would be
but doing them an injury to enlarge their knowledge. And might not the
thought be suggested at some moment, (see how many things may be envied in
their turns!) how happy _they_ should be, if, with the vast superiority of
their advantages, they could still be just as little accountable? But if
even in this way, of envy, they received an unwelcome admonition of their
own high responsibility, not even then was it suggested to them, that they
should ever be arraigned on a charge to which they would vainly wish to be
permitted to plead, "Were we our brothers' keepers?" And if an office
designated in those terms had been named to them, as a part of their duty,
by some unearthly voice of imperious accent, their thoughts might have
traversed hither and thither, in various conjectures and protracted
perplexity, before the objects of that office had been presented
explicitly to their apprehension as no other than the reason, principles,
consciences, and the whole moral condition of the vulgar mass. They would
understand that its condition was, _in some way or other_, a concern lying
at their door, but probably not in this.--We speak generally, and not
universally.
* * * * *
But we would believe there are signs of a revolution beginning; a more
important one, by its higher principle and its expansive impulse toward a
wide and remote beneficence, than the ordinary events of that name. What
have commonly been the matter and circumstance of revolutions? The last
deciding blow in a deadly competition of equally selfish parties; actions
and reactions of ambition and revenge; the fiat of a conqueror; a burst of
blind fury, suddenly sweeping away an old order of things, but
overwhelming to all attempts to substitute a better institution; plots,
massacres, battles, dethronements, restorations: all actuated by a
fermentation of the ordinary or the basest elements of humanity. How
little of the sublime of moral agency has there been, with one or two
partial exceptions, in these mighty commotions; how little wisdom or
virtue, or reference to the Supreme Patron of national interests; how
little nobleness or even distinctness of purpose, or consolidated
advantage of success! But here is, as we trust, the approach of a
revolution with different phenomena. It displays the nature of its
principle and its ambition in a conviction, far more serious and extensive
than heretofore, of the necessity of education to the mass of the
population, with earnest discussions of its scope and methods by both
speculative and practical men; in schemes, more speedily animated into
operation than good designs were wont to be, for spreading useful
knowledge over tracts of the dead waste where there was none; in exciting
tens of thousands of young persons to a benevolent and patient activity in
the instruction of the children of the poor; in an extended and extending
system of means and exertions for the universal diffusion of the sacred
scriptures; in multiplying endeavors, in all regular and all uncanonical
ways, to render it next to impossible for the people to avoid hearing some
sounds at least of the voice of religion; in the formation of useful local
institutions too various to come under one denomination; in enterprises to
attempt an opening of the vast prison-houses of human spirits in dark
distant regions; in bringing to the test of principles many notions and
practices which have stood on the authority of prejudice, custom, and
prescription: and all this taking advantage of the new and powerful spirit
which has come on the world to drive its affairs into commotion and
acceleration; as bold adventurers have sometimes availed themselves of a
formidable torrent to be conveyed whither the stream in its ordinary state
would never have carried them; or as we have heard of heroic assailants
seizing the moment of a tempest to break through the enemy's lines.--Such
are some of the insignia by which it stands distinguished out and far off
from the rank of ordinary revolutions.
We are not unaware that, with certain speculators on this same subject of
meliorating the state and character of the people, some of the things here
specified will be of small account, either as signs of a great change, or
as means of promoting it. The widely spreading activity of a humble class
of laborers, who seek no fame for their toils and sacrifices, is but a
creeping process, almost invisible in the survey. The multiplied,
voluntary, and extraordinary efforts to diffuse some religious knowledge
and sentiment among the vulgar, appear to them, if not even of doubtful
tendency, at least of such impotence for corrective operation, that any
confidence founded on them is simple fanaticism; that the calculation is,
to use a commercial term, mere moonshine. We remember when a publication
of great note and influence flung contempt on the sanguine expectations
entertained from the rapid circulation of Bibles among the inferior
population. At the hopeful mention of expedients of the religious kind
especially, the class of speculators in question might perhaps be reminded
of Glendower's grave and believing talk of calling up spirits to perform
his will; or (should they ever have happened to read the Bible) of the
people who seized, in honest credulous delight, the mockery of a proposal
of pulling a city, to the last stone, into the river with ropes, as a
prime stroke of generalship.
When we see such expedients rated so low in the process for raising the
populace from their degradation, we ask what means these speculators
themselves would reckon on for the purpose. And it would appear that their
scheme would calculate mainly on some supposed dispositions of a political
and economical nature. Let the people be put in possession of all their
rights as citizens, and thus advanced in the scale of society. Let all
invidious distinctions which are artificial, arbitrary, and not
inevitable, be abolished; together with all laws and regulations
injuriously affecting their temporal well-being. Give them thus a sense of
being _something_ in the great social order, a direct palpable interest in
the honor and prosperity of the community. There will then be a dignified
sense of independence; the generous, liberalizing, ennobling sentiments of
freedom; the self-respect and conscious responsibility of men in the full
exercise of their rights; the manly disdain of what is base; the innate
perception of what is worthy and honorable, developing itself
spontaneously on the removal of the ungenial circumstances in the
constitution of society, which have been as a long winter on the
intellectual and moral nature of its inferior portions. All this will
conduce to the practicability and efficacy of education. It will be an
education _to fit them for an education_ to be introduced with the
progress of that fitness; intellectual culture finding a felicitous
adaptation of the soil. We may then adopt with some confidence a public
system, or stimulate and assist all independent local exertions for the
instruction of the people in the rudiments of literature and general
knowledge; and religion too, if you will.
But, to say nothing of the vain fancies of the virtues ready to disclose
themselves in a corrupt mass, under the auspices of improved political
institutions, it is unfortunate for any such speculation that what it
insists on as the primary condition cannot as yet, but very imperfectly,
be had. The higher and commanding portion of the community have, very
naturally, the utmost aversion to concede to the people what are claimed
as theoretically their rights. They have, indeed, latterly been
constrained to make considerable concessions in name and semblance. But
their great and various power will be strenuously exerted, for probably a
long while yet, to render the acquisitions made by the people as nearly as
possible profitless in their hands. And unhappily these predominant
classes have to allege the mental and moral rudeness of the lower, in
vindication of this determined policy of repression and frustration; thus
turning the consequences of their own criminal neglect into a defence of
their injustice. They will say, If the subordinate millions had grown up
into a rational existence; if they had been rendered capable of thinking,
judging, distinguishing, if they were in possession of a moderate share of
useful information, and withal a strong sense of duty; then might this and
the other privilege, or call it right, in the social constitution be
yielded to them. But as long as they continue in their present mental
grossness they are unfit for the possession, because unqualified for the
exercise, of any such privileges as would take them from under our
authoritative control.
Since they can and will, for the present, maintain this controlling power,
to the extent of nearly invalidating any political advancement attained,
or likely to be soon attained, by the lower grades, a speculation that
should place on that advancement, as a pre-requisite, our hope of a great
change in the mental condition of the people, would be, to adopt a humble
figure, setting us to climb to an upper platform without a ladder, or
rather telling us not to climb at all. And while this supposed
pre-requisite will be refused, on the allegation that the uncultivated
condition of the people renders them unfit for a liberal political
arrangement, the parties so refusing will be little desirous to have the
obstacle removed; foreseeing, as the inevitable consequence of a highly
improved cultivation, a more resolute demand of the advantages withheld, a
constantly augmenting force of popular opinion, and therefore a diminution
of their own predominant power. They will deem it much more commodious for
themselves, that the people should not be so enlightened and raised as to
come into any such competition. And since they, with these dispositions,
have the preponderance in what we denominate the State, we fear we are not
to look with much hope to the State for a liberal and effective system of
national education.
* * * * *
What then is to be done?--We earnestly wish it might please the Sovereign
Ruler to do one more new thing in the earth, compelling the dominant
powers in the nations to an order of institutions and administrations that
_would_ apply the energy of the state to so noble a purpose. Nor can we
imagine any test of their merits so fair as the question whether, and in
what degree, they do this; nor any test by which they may more naturally
decline to have those merits tried. But since, to the shame of our nature,
there is no use to which we are so prone to turn our condemnation of evil
in one form, as that of purchasing a license for it in another, the
persons who are justly arraigning the powers at the head of nations should
be warned that they do not take from the guilty omissions of states a
sanction for individuals to do nothing. Let them not suffer an imposition
on their minds in the notion entertained of a state, as a thing to be no
otherwise accounted of than in a collective capacity, acting by a
government; as if the collective power and agency of a nation became, in
being exerted through that political organ, an affair altogether foreign
to the will, the action, the duty, the responsibility, of the persons of
whom the nation is composed. Let them not put out of sight that whatever
is the duty of the national body in that collective capacity, acting
through its government, is such only because it is the duty of the
individuals composing that body, as far as it is in the power of each; and
that it would be their duty individually not the less, though the
government, as the depositary of the national power, neglect it. But more
than this; to speak generally, and with certain degrees of possible
exception, we may affirm that a government _cannot_ be lastingly
neglectful of a great duty but because the individuals constituting the
community are so. An assertion, that a government has been utterly and
criminally neglectful of the moral condition of the inferior population,
age after age, and through every change of its administrators; but that,
nevertheless, the generality of the individuals of intelligence, wealth,
and influence, have all the while been of a quite opposite spirit,
zealously intent on remedying the flagrant evil, would be instantly
rejected as a contradiction. Such an enlightened and philanthropic spirit
prevailing widely among the individuals of the nation would carry its
impulse into the government in one manner or another. It would either
constrain the administrators of the state to act in conformity, or
ultimately displace them in favor of better men. Even if, short of such a
_general_ activity of the respectable and locally influential members of
society, a large proportion of them had vigorously prosecuted such a
purpose, it would have compelled the administrators of the state to
consider, even for their own sake, whether they should be content to see
so important a process going on independently of them, and in contrast
with their own disgraceful neglect.
But at the worst, and on the supposition that they were obstinately
inaccessible to all moral and philanthropic considerations, still a grand
improvement would have been accomplished, if many thousands of the
responsible members of the community had attempted it with zealous and
persevering exertion. The neglect, therefore, of the improvement of the
people, so glaring in the review of our conduct as a nation, has been, to
a very great extent, the insensibility of individuals to obligations lying
on them as such, independently of the institutions and administration of
the state.
And are individuals _now_ absolved from all such responsibility; and the
more so, that the conviction of the importance of the object is come upon
them with such a new and cogent force? When they say, reproachfully, that
the nation, as a body politic, concentrating its powers in its government,
disowns or neglects a most important duty, is it to be understood that
this accusatory testimony is _their_ share, or something equivalent in
substitution for their share, of that very duty? Does a collective duty of
such very solid substance, vanish into nothing under any attempted process
of resolving it into fractions and portions for individuals? And do they
themselves, as some of the individuals to whom this duty might thus be
distributively assigned,--do they themselves, in spite of self-love,
self-estimation, and all the sentiments which they will at other times
indulge in homage of their own importance,--do they, when this assignment
is attempted to be made to them, instantly and willingly surrender to a
feeling of crumbling down from this proud individuality into an
undistinguishable existence in the mass; and, profaning the language of
religion, say to the State, "In thee we live, move, and have a being?" Or,
will they, (in assimilation to eastern pagans, who hold that a divinity so
pervades them as to be their wills and do their actions, leaving the mere
human vehicle without power, duty, or accountableness,) will they account
themselves but as passive matter, moved or fixed, and in all things
necessitated, by a sovereign mythological something denominated the state?
No, not in all things. It is not so that they feel with respect to those
other interests and projects, which they are really in earnest to promote,
though those concerns may lie in no greater proportion than the one in
question does within the scope of their individual ability. The incubus
has then vanished; and they find themselves in possession of a free
agency, and a degree of power, which they will not patiently hear
estimated in any such contemptuous terms. What is there then that should
reduce them, as individual agents, to such utter and willing
insignificance in the affair of which we are speaking? Besides, they may
form themselves, in indefinite number, into combination. And is there no
power in any collective form in which they can be associated, save just
that one in which the aggregation is constituted under the political shape
and authority denominated a state? Or is it at last that some alarm of
superstitious loyalty comes over them; that they grow uneasy in conscience
at the high-toned censure they have been stimulated and betrayed to
pronounce on the state; that they relapse into the obsequiousness of
hesitating, whether they should presume to do good of a kind which the
"Power ordained of God" has not seen fit to do; that they must wait for
the sanction of its great example; that till the "shout of kings is among
them" it were better not to march against the vandalism and the paganism
which are, the while, quite at their ease, destroying the people?
But if such had always been the way in which private individuals, single
or associated, had accounted of themselves and their possible exertions,
in regard to great general improvements, but very few would ever have been
accomplished. For the case has commonly been, that the schemes of such
improvements have originated with persons not invested with political
power; have been urged on by the accession and co-operation of such
individuals; and at length slowly and reluctantly acceded to by the
holders of dominion over the community, always, through some malignant
fatality, the last to admit what had long appeared to the majority of
thinking men no less than demonstrative evidence of the propriety and
advantage of the reformation.
In all probability, the improvement of mankind is destined, under
Providence, to advance nearly in proportion as good men feel the
responsibility for it resting on themselves as individuals, and are
actuated by a bold sentiment of independence, (humble at the same time, in
reference to the necessity of Divine intervention,) in the prosecution of
it. Each person who is standing still to look, with grief or indignation,
at the evils which are overrunning the world, would do well to recollect
what he may have read of some gallant partisan, who, perceiving where a
prompt movement, with the comparatively slender force at his own command,
would make an impression infallibly tending to the success of the warfare,
could not endure to lose the time till some great sultan should find it
convenient to come in slow march, and the pomp of state, to take on him
the direction of the campaign.
In laying this emphasis of incitement and hope on the exertions of good
men as individuals, we cannot be understood to mean that the government of
states, if ever they did come to be intent on rendering the condition of
society better and happier, could not contribute beyond all calculation to
the force and efficacy of _every_ project and measure for that grand
purpose. How far from it! it is melancholy to consider what they might do
and do not. But it is because their history, thus far, affords such feeble
prognostics of their becoming, till some better age, actuated by such a
spirit,--it is because the Divine Governor has hitherto put upon them so
little of the honor of being the instruments of his beneficence,--that the
anticipations of good, and the exhortations to attempt it, are so
peculiarly directed to its promoters in an individual capacity.
Happily, the accusatory part of such exhortations is becoming, we trust we
may say fast becoming, less extensively applicable; and we return with
pleasure to the animating idea of that revolution of which we were noting
the introductory signs. It is a revolution in the manner of estimating the
souls of the people, and consequently in the judgment of what should be
done for both their present and future welfare. Through many ages, that
immense multitude had been but obscurely presented to view in any such
character as that of rational, improvable creatures. They were recognized
no otherwise than as one large mass of rude moral substance, but faintly
distinguishable into individuals; existing, and to be left to exist, in
their own manner; and that manner hardly worth concern or inquiry. Little
consideration could there be of how much spiritual immortal essence must
be going to waste, absorbed in the very earth, all over the wide field
where the inferior portion of humanity was seen only through the gross
medium of an economical estimate, by the more favored part of the race.
But now it is as if a mist were rising and dispersing from that field, and
leaving the multitude of possessors of uncultivated and degraded mind
exhibited in a light in which they were never seen before, except by the
faithful promoters of Christianity, and a few philanthropists of a less
special order.
It is true, this manifestation forms so tragic a vision, that if we had
only to behold it _as a spectacle_, we might well desire that the misty
obscurity should descend on it again, to shroud it from sight; while we
should be left to indulge and elate our imaginations by dwelling on the
pomps and splendors of the terrestrial scene,--the mighty empires, the
heroes, the victories, the triumphs; the refinements and enjoyments of the
most highly cultivated of the race; the brilliant performances of genius,
and the astonishing reach of science. So the tempter would have beguiled
our Lord into a complacent contemplation of the kingdoms and glories of
the world. But he was come to look on a different aspect of it! Nor could
he be withdrawn from the gloomy view of its degradation and misery. And a
good reason why. For the sole object for which he had appeared in the only
world where temptation could even in form approach him was to begin in
operation, and finish in virtue, a design for changing that state of
degradation and misery. In the prosecution of such a design, and in the
spirit of that divine benevolence in which it sprung, he could endure to
fix on the melancholy and odious character of the scene, the contemplation
which was vainly attempted to be diverted to any other of its aspects.
What, indeed, could sublunary pomps and glories be to him in any case; but
emphatically what, when his object was to redeem the people from darkness
and destruction?
Those who, actuated by a spirit in some humble resemblance to his, have
entered deeply into the state of the people, such as it is found in our
own nation, have often been appalled at the spectacle disclosed to them.
They have been astonished to think, what _can_ have been the direction,
while successive ages have passed away, of so many thousands of acute and
vigilant mental eyes, that so dreadful a sight should scarcely have been
descried. They have been aware that in describing it as they actually saw
it, they would be regarded by some as gloomy fanatics, tinctured with
insanity by the influence of some austere creed; and that others, of
kinder nature, but whose sensibility has more of self-indulging refinement
than tendency to active benevolence, would almost wish that so revolting
an exhibition had never been made, though the fact be actually so. There
may have been moments when they themselves have experienced a temporary
recoil of their benevolent zeal, under the impression at once of the
immensity of the evil, so defying the feebleness of their remedial means
and efforts, and of its noisome quality. At times, the rudeness of the
subjects, and perhaps the ungracious reception and thankless requital of
their disinterested labors, aggravating the general feeling of the
miserableness (so to express it) of seeing so much misery, have lent
seduction to the temptations to ease and self-indulgence. Why should they,
just _they_ of all men, condemn themselves to dwell so much in the most
dreary climate of the moral world, when they could perhaps have taken
their almost constant abode in a little elysium of elegant knowledge,
taste, and refined society? Then was the time to revert to the example of
Him "who, though he was rich, for our sakes became poor."
Or, again, they may have been betrayed to indulge too long in the bitter
mood of thinking, how entirely the higher and more amply furnished powers
leave such generous designs to proceed as they can, in the mere strength
of private individual exertion. And they may have yielded to depressive
feelings after the fervor of indignant ones; for such indignation, unless
qualified by the purest principle--unless it be the "anger that sins
not"--is very apt, when it cools, to settle into misanthropic despondency.
It is as if (they have said) armies and giants would stand aloof to amuse
themselves, while we are to be committed and abandoned in the ceaseless,
unavailable toil of a conflict, which these armies and giants have no
business even to exist as such but for the very purpose of waging. We are,
if we will,--and if we will we may let it alone--to try to effect in
diminutive pieces, and detached local efforts, a little share of that, to
the accomplishment of which the greatest human force on earth might be
applied on system, and to the widest compass. So they have said, perhaps,
and been tempted to leave their object to its destiny.
But really it is now too late for this resentful and desponding
abandonment. They cannot now retire in the tragic dignity of despair. It
must be some more forlorn predicament that would allow them any grace of
rhetoric in saying, as in parody of Cato, "Witness heaven and earth, that
we have done our duty, but the stars and fate are against us; and here it
becomes us to terminate a strife, which would degenerate into the
ridiculous, if prosecuted against impossibilities." On the contrary, the
zeal which could begin so onerous a work, and prosecute it thus far, could
not now remit without convicting its past ardor of cowardice lurking under
its temporary semblance of bravery. Is it for the projectors of a noble
edifice of public utility, to abandon the undertaking when it has risen
from its foundation to be seen above the ground; or is just come to be
level with the surface of the waters, in defiance of which it has been
commenced, and the violence of which it was designed to control, or the
unfordable depths and streams of which it was to bear people over? Let the
promoters of education and Christian knowledge among the inferior classes,
reflect what has already been accomplished; though regarding it as quite
the incipient stage. It is most truly as yet "the day of small things;"
and shall they despise it, from an idea of what it might have been if the
great powers had been directed to its advancement? They have found that in
the good cause thus unaided they have not wholly labored in vain; that it
_can_ be brought in contact with a considerable portion of what would
otherwise be so much human existence abandoned; and that already, as from
the garments of the Divine Healer of diseases, a sanative virtue goes out
of it. Let them recount the individuals they have seen, and not despond as
to many more, rescued from what had all the signs of a destination to the
lowest debasement, and utter ruin; some of whom are returning animated
thanks, and will do so in the hour of death, for what these, their best
human friends, have been the means of imparting to them. Let them
recollect of how many families they have seen the domestic condition
pleasingly, and in some instances eminently and delightfully amended. And
let them reflect how they have trampled down prejudices, nearly silenced a
heathenish clamor, and provoked the imitative and rival efforts of many
who would, but for them, have been willing enough for all such schemes to
lie in abeyance to the end of time. Let them think of all this, and
faithfully persist in the trial what it may please God that they shall
accomplish, whether the possessors of national power will acknowledge his
demand for such an application of it or not; whether, when the infinite
importance of the concern is represented to them, they will hear, or
whether they will forbear.
But let them not doubt that the time will come, when the rulers and the
ascendant classes in states will comprehend it to be their best policy to
promote all possible improvement of the people. It will be given to them
to understand, that the highest glory of those at the head of great
communities, must consist in the eminence attained by those communities
generally, in whatever it is that constitutes the worth, the honor, the
happiness, of individuals; a glory with which would be combined the
advantage that the office of presiding over such a nation could be
administered in a liberal spirit. They will one day have learned to esteem
it a far nobler form of power to lead and direct an immense society of
intelligent minds, than to delude, coerce, and drive a vast semi-barbarous
herd. Providence surely will one day, in the progress of society, confer
on it such wise and virtuous rulers as can feel, that it is better for
them to have a people who can understand and rationally approve, when
deserving of approbation, their system and measures, than one bent in
stupid submission, even if ignorance could henceforward suffice (which it
cannot) to retain the people in that posture; better, therefore, by a
still stronger reason, than to have a people fermenting in ignorant
disaffection, constantly believing the governors to be in the wrong, and
without the sense to comprehend any arguments in justification, excepting
such as might be addressed in the shape of bribes to corruption. And a
time will come when it will not be left to the philanthropic or censorial
speculatists alone, to make the comparative estimate between what has been
effected by the enormously expensive apparatus of coercive and penal
administration--the prisons, prosecutions, transportations, and a large
military police, (things quite necessary in our past and present national
condition,)--and what _might_ have been effected by one half of that
expenditure devoted to popular reformation, to be accomplished by means of
schools, and every practicable variety of methods for placing men's
judgment and conscience as the "lion in the way," when they are inclined
and tempted to go wrong.--All this will come to pass at length. And if the
promoters of the best designs see cause to fear that the time is remote,
this should but enforce upon them the more strongly the admonition that no
time is _theirs_, but the present.
It was not possible to pursue the long course of these observations so
nearly to the conclusion, without being reminded still again of what we
have adverted to before, that there will be persons ready to impute
sanguine extravagance to our expectations of the result of such an order
of means and exertions, for the improvement of the education and mental
condition of the people, as we see already beginning to work. When the
means are of so little splendid a quality, it will be said, by what
inflation of fancy is their power admeasured to such effects?
And what _is_ it, then, and how much, that is expected as the result, by
the zealous advocates of schools, and the whole order of expedients, for
the instruction of that part of the rising generation till lately so
neglected? Are they heard maintaining that the communication of knowledge,
or true notions of things, to youthful minds, will _infallibly_ ensure
their virtue and happiness? They are not quite so new to the world, to
experimental labor in the business of tuition, or to self-observation.
Their vigilance would hardly overlook such a circumstance as the very
different degree of assurance with which the effects may be predicted, of
ignorance on the one hand, and of knowledge on the other. There is very
nearly an absolute certainty of success in the method for making clowns,
sots, vagabonds, and ruffians. You may safely leave it to themselves to
carry on the process for becoming complete. Let human creatures grow up
without discipline, destitute therefore of salutary information, sound
judgment, or any conscience but what will shape itself to whatever they
like, serving in the manner of some vile friar pander in the old
plays,--and no one takes any credit for foresight in saying they will be a
noxious burden on the earth; except indeed in those tracts of it where
they seem to have their appropriate place and business, in being matched
against the wolves and bears of the wilderness. When they infest what
should be a civilized and Christianized part of the world, the
philanthropist is sometimes put in doubt whether to repress, or indulge,
the sentiment which tempts him to complacency in the operation of an
epidemic which is thinning their numbers.
The consequences of ignorance are certain, unless almost a miracle
interpose; but unhappily those of knowledge are of diffident and
restricted calculation; unless we could make a trifle of the testimony of
all ages, and suppress the evidence of present experience, that men may
see and approve the better, and yet follow the worse. It is the hapless
predicament of our nature, that the noblest of its powers, the
understanding, has but most imperfectly and precariously that commanding
hold on the others, which is essential to the good order of the soul. Our
constitution is like a machine in which there is a constant liability of
the secondary wheels to be thrown out of the catch and grapple of the
master one. And worse than so, these powers which ought to be subordinate
and obedient to the understanding, are not left to stand still when
detached from its control. They have a strong activity of their own, from
the impulse of other principles: indeed, it is this impulse that _causes_
the detachment. It is frightful to look at the evidence from facts, that
these active powers _may_ grow strong in the perversity which will set the
judgment at defiance, during the very time that it is successfully
training to a competence for dictating to them what is right. The
assertions of those who are determined to find the chief or only cause of
the wrong direction of the passions and will in misapprehension of the
understanding, are a gross assumption, in a question of fact, against an
infinite crowd of facts pressing round with their evidence. This evidence
is offered by men without number distinctly and deliberately acknowledging
their conviction of the evil quality and fatal consequences, of courses
which they are soon afterwards seen pursuing, and without the smallest
pretence of a change of opinion; by the same men in more advanced stages
still owning the same conviction, and sometimes in strong terms of
self-reproach, in the checks and pauses of their career; and by men in the
near prospect of death and judgment expressing, in bitter regret, the
acknowledgment that they had persisted in acting wrong when they knew
better. And this assumption, made against such evidence, is to be
maintained for no better reason, that appears, than a wilful determination
that human nature cannot, must not, shall not, be so absurd and depraved
as to be capable of such madness: as if human nature were taking the
smallest trouble to put on any disguise before them, to beguile them into
a good opinion; as if it could be cajoled by their flattery to assume even
a semblance of deserving it; as if it had the complaisance to check one
bad propensity, to save them from standing contradicted and exposed to
ridicule for speaking of it with indulgence or respect; as if it stayed or
cared to thank them for their pains in attempting to make out a plausible
extenuation. It has, and keeps, and shows its character, in perfect
indifference to the puzzled efforts of its apologists to reduce its moral
turpitude to just so much error of the understanding. But, as for
understanding--it should be time to look to their own, when they find
themselves asserting, in other words, that there is actually as much
virtue in the world as there is knowledge of its principles and laws. We
should rather have surmised that, deplorably deficient as that knowledge
is, the reduction of a fifth or tenth part of it to practice would make a
glorious change in England and Europe.
The persons, therefore, whose zeal is combined with knowledge in the
prosecution of plans for the extension of education, proceed on a
calculation of an effect more limited, in apparent proportion to the
means, and with less certainty of even that more limited measure in any
single instance, than they would have been justified in anticipating in
many other departments of operation. They would, for example, predict more
positively the results of an undertaking to cultivate any tract of waste
land, to reclaim a bog, or to render mechanical forces available in an
untried mode of application; or, in many cases, the decided success of the
healing art as applied to a diseased body. They must needs be moderate in
their confidence of calculation for good, on a moral nature whose
corruption would yield an enemy of mankind a gratifying probability in
calculating for evil. In comparing these opposite calculations, they would
be glad if they might make an exchange of the respective probabilities.
That is to say, let a man, if such there be, who could be pleased with the
depravity and misery of the race, a sagacious judge too, of their moral
constitution, and a veteran observer of their conduct,--let him survey
with the look of an evil spirit a hundred children in one of the
benevolent schools, and indulge himself in prognosticating, on the
strength of what he knows of human nature, the proportion, in numbers and
degree, in which these children will, in subsequent life, exemplify the
_failure_ of what is done for their wisdom and welfare;--let him make his
calculation, and, we say, there may be times when the friends of these
institutions would be glad to transfer the quantity of probability from
his side to theirs; would feel they should be happy if the proportion in
which they fear he may be right in calculating on evil from the nature of
the beings under discipline, were, instead, the proportion in which it is
rational to reckon on good from the efficacy of that discipline. "Evil, be
thou my good," might be their involuntary apostrophe, in the sense of
wishing to possess the stronger power, transmuted to the better quality.
But we shall know where to stop in the course of observations of this
darkening color: and shall take off the point of the derider's taunt, just
forthcoming, that we are here unsaying, in effect, all that we have been
so laboriously urging about the vast benefit of knowledge to the people.
It was proper to show, that the prosecutors of these designs are not
suffering themselves to be duped out of a perception of what there is, in
the nature of the youthful subjects, to counteract the intention of the
discipline, and with too certain a power to limit its efficacy to a very
partial measure of the effect desired. These projectors might fairly be
required to prove they are not unknowing enthusiasts; but then, in keeping
clear of the vain extravagances of expectation, they are not to surrender
their confidence that something great and important can be done; it should
be possible for a man to be sober, short of being dead. They are not to
gravitate into a state of feeling as if they thought the understanding and
the moral powers are but casually associated in the mind; as if an
important communication to the one, might, so to speak, never be heard of
by the others; as if these subordinates had just one sole principle of
action--that of disobeying their chief, so that it could be of no use to
appeal to the master of the house respecting the conduct of his inmates;
as if, therefore, _all_ presumption of a relation between means and ends,
as a ground of confidence in the efficacy of popular instruction, must be
illusory. It might not indeed be amiss for them to be _told_ that the case
is so, by those who would desire, from whatever motive, to repress their
efforts and defeat their designs. For so downright a blow at the vital
principle of their favorite object would but serve to provoke them to
ascertain more definitely what there really is for them to found their
schemes and hopes upon, and therefore to verify to themselves the reasons
they have for persisting, in assurance that the labor will be far from
wholly lost. And for this assurance it is, at the very lowest,
self-evident, that there is at any rate such an efficacy in cultivation,
as to give a certainty that a well-cultivated people _cannot_ remain on
the same degraded moral level as a neglected ignorant one--or anywhere
near it. None of those even that value such designs the least, ever
pretend to foresee, in the event of their being carried into effect, an
undiminished prevalence of rudeness and brutality of manners, of delight
in spectacles and amusements of cruelty, of noisy revelry, of sottish
intemperance, or of disregard of character. It is not pretended to be
foreseen, that the poorer classes will then continue to display so much of
that almost desperate improvidence respecting their temporal means and
prospects, which has aggravated the calamities of the present times. It is
not predicted that a universal school-discipline will bring up several
millions to the neglect, and many of them in an impudent contempt, of
attendance on the ministrations of religion. The result will at all
hazards, by every one's acknowledgment, be _the contrary of this_.
But more specifically:--The promoters of the plans of popular education
see a most important advantage gained in the very outset, in the obvious
fact, that in their schools a very large portion of time is employed well,
that otherwise would infallibly be employed ill. Let any one introduce
himself into one of these places of concourse, where there has been time
to mature the arrangements. He should not enter as an important personage,
in patronizing and judicial state, as if to demand the respectful looks of
the whole tribe from their attention to their printed rudiments and their
slates; but glide in as a quiet observer, just to survey at his leisure
the character and operations of the scene. Undoubtedly he may descry here
and there the signs of inattention, weariness or vacancy, not to say of
perverseness. Even these individuals, however, are out of the way of
practical harm; and at the same time he will see a multitude of youthful
spirits acknowledging the duty of directing their best attention to
something altogether foreign to their wild amusements; of making a rather
protracted effort in one mode or another of the strange business of
_thinking_. He will perceive in many the unequivocal indications of a
serious and earnest effort made to acquire, with the aid visible signs and
implements, a command of what is invisible and immaterial. They are thus
rising from the mere animal state to tread in the precincts of an
intellectual economy; the economy of thought and truth, in which they are
to live forever; and never, in all futurity, will they have to regret, for
itself, [Footnote: _For itself_--a phrase of qualification inserted to
meed the captious remark, that there have been instances of bad men, under
the reproach of conscience of the dread of consequences, expressing a
regret that they had ever been well instructed, since this was an
aggravation of their guilt, and perhaps had subserved their evil
propensities with the more effectual means and ability.] _this_ period and
part of their employments. He will be delighted to think how many
regulated actions of the mind, how many just ideas distinctly admitted,
that were unknown or unimpressed at the beginning of the day's exercise,
(and among these ideas, some to remind them of God and their highest
interest,) there will have been by the time the busy and well-ordered
company breaks up in the evening, and leaves silence within these walls.
He will not indeed grow romantic in hope; he knows the nature of which
these beings partake; knows therefore that the desired results of this
process will but partially follow; but still rejoices to think those
partial results which will most certainly follow, will be worth
incomparably more than all they will have cost to the learners, or the
teachers, or the patrons.
Now let him, when he has contemplated this scene, consider how the
greatest part of this numerous company would have been employed during the
same hours, whether of the Sabbath or other days, but for such a provision
of means for their instruction. And, for the contrast, he has only to
leave the school, and walk a mile round the neighborhood, in which it will
be very wonderful, (we may say this of most parts of England,) if he shall
not, in a populous district, especially near a great town, and on a fine
day, meet with a great number of wretched, disgusting imps, straggling or
in knots, in the activity of mischief and nuisance, or at least the full
cry of vile and profane language; with here and there, as a lord among
them, an elder larger one growing fast into an insolent adult blackguard.
He may make the comparison, quite sure that such as they are, and so
employed, would many now under the salutary discipline of yonder school
have been, but for its institution. But the two classes so beheld in
contrast, might they not seem to belong to two different nations? Do they
not seem growing into two extremely different orders of character? Do they
not even seem preparing for different worlds in the final distribution?
The friends of these designs for a general and highly improved education,
may proceed further in this course of verifying to themselves the grounds
of their assurance of happy consequences. A number of ideas, the most
important that were ever formed in human thought, or imparted to men from
the Supreme Mind, will be so communicated and impressed in these
institutions, that it is absolutely certain they will be fixed irrevocably
in the minds of the pupils. And in the case of many, if not the majority
of these destined adventurers into the temptations of life, these
important ideas, thus inserted deep in their souls, will distinctly
present themselves to judgment and conscience an incalculable number of
times. What a number, if the sum of all these reminiscences, in all the
minds now assembled in a numerous school, could be conjectured! But if one
in a hundred of these recollections, if one in a thousand, shall be
efficacious, who can compute the amount of the good resulting from the
instruction which shall have so enforced and fixed these ideas that they
shall inevitably be thus recollected? And is it altogether out of reason
to hope that the desired efficacy will, far oftener than once in a
thousand times, attend the luminous rising again of a solemn idea to the
view of the mind! Is still less than _this_ to be predicted for our
unhappy nature, while, however fallen, it is not abandoned by the care of
its Creator!
The institutions themselves will gradually improve, in both the method and
the compass of their discipline. They will acquire a more vigorous
mechanism, and a more decidedly intellectual character. In this latter
respect, it is but comparatively of late years that schools for the
inferior classes have ventured anything beyond the humblest pretensions.
Mental cultivation--enlarged knowledge--elements of science--habit of
thinking--exercise of judgment--free and enlightened opinion--higher
grade in society--were terms which they were to be reverently cautious of
taking in vain. There would have been an offensive sound in such phrases,
as seeming to betray somewhat of the impertinence of a _disposition_, (for
the idea of the _practicability_ of any such invasion would have been
scorned,) to encroach on a ground exclusively appropriate to the superior
orders. Schools for the poor were to be as little as possible scholastic.
They were to be kept down to the lowest level of the workshop, excepting
perhaps in one particular--that of working hard: for the scholars were to
throw time away rather than be occupied with anything beyond the merest
rudiments. The advocates and the petitioners for aid of such schools, were
to avow and plead how little it was that they pretended or presumed to
teach. The argument in their behalf was either to begin or end with
saying, that they taught _only_ reading and writing; or if it could not be
denied that there was to be some meddling with arithmetic and grammar,--we
may safely appeal to some of the veterans of these pleaders, whether they
did not, thirty or forty years since, bring out this addition with the
management and hesitation of a confession and apology. It is a prominent
characteristic of that happy revolution we have spoken of as in
commencement, that this aristocratic notion of education is breaking up.
The theory of the subject is loosening into enlargement, and will cease by
degrees to impose a niggardly restriction on the extent of the
cultivation, proper to be attempted in schools for the inferiors of the
community.
As these institutions go on, augmenting in number and improving in
organization, their pupils will bring their quality and efficacy to the
proof, as they grow to maturity, and go forth to act their part in
society. And there can be no doubt, that while too many of them may be
mournful exemplifications of the power with which the evil genius of the
corrupt nature, combined with the infection of a bad world, resists the
better influences of instruction, and may, after the advantage of such an
introductory stage, be carried down towards the old debasement, a very
considerable proportion will take and permanently maintain a far higher
ground. They will have become imbued with an element, which must put them
in strong repulsion to that coarse vulgar that will be sure to continue in
existence, in this country, long enough to be a trial of the moral taste
of this better cultivated race. It will be seen that they cannot associate
with it by choice, and in the spirit of companionship. And while they are
thus withheld on their part, from approximating, it may be hoped that in
certain better disposed parts of that vulgar, there may be a conversion of
the repelling principle into an impulse to approach and join them on their
own ground. There will be numbers among it who cannot be so entirely
insensate or perverse, as to look with carelessness at the advantages
obtained through the sole medium of personal improvement, by those who had
otherwise been exactly on the same level of low resources and estimation
as themselves. The effect of this view on pride, in some, and on better
propensities, it may be hoped, in others, will be to excite them to make
their way upward to a community which, they will clearly see, could commit
no greater folly than to come downward to them. And we will presume a
friendly disposition in most of those who shall have been raised to this
higher standing, to meet such aspirers and help them to ascend.
And while they will thus draw upward the less immovable and hopeless part
of the mass below them, they will themselves, on the other hand, be
placed, by the respectability of their understanding and manners, within
the influence of the higher cultivation of the classes above them; a great
advantage, as we have taken a former occasion to notice:--a great
advantage, that is to say, if the cultivation among those classes _be_
generally of such a quality and measure, that the people could not be
brought a few degrees nearer to them without becoming, through the effect
of their example, more in love with sense, knowledge, and propriety of
conduct. For it were somewhat too much of simplicity, perhaps, to take it
for quite a thing of course that the people would always perceive such
intellectual accomplishments as would keep them modest or humble in their
estimate of their own, and such liberal spirit and manners as would at
once command their respect and conduce to their refinement, when they made
any approach to a communication with the classes superior in possessions
and station. If this _might_ have been assumed as a thing of course, and
if therefore it might have been confidently reckoned on, that the more
improving of the people would receive from the ranks above them a salutary
influence, similar to that which we have been supposing they will
themselves exert on a part of the vulgar mass below them, there had been a
happy omen for the community; and if it may not be so assumed, are we to
have the disgraceful deficiencies of the upper classes pleaded as an
argument against raising the lower from their degradation? Must the
multitude flounder along the mud at the bottom of the upward slope,
because their betters will not be at the cost of making for themselves a
higher terraced road across it than that they are now walking on?
* * * * *
But it would be an admirable turn to make the lower orders act
beneficially on the higher. And it is an important advantage likely to
accrue from the better education of the common people, that their rising
attainments would compel not a few of their superiors to look to the state
of their own mental pretensions, on perceiving that _this_, at last, was
becoming a ground on which, in no small part, their precedence was to be
measured. Surely it would be a most excellent thing, that they should find
themselves thus incommodiously pressed upon by the only circumstance,
perhaps, that could make them sensible there are more kinds of poverty
than that single one to which alone they had hitherto attached ideas of
disgrace; and should be forced to preserve that ascendency for which
wealth and station would formerly suffice, at the cost, now, of a good
deal more reading, thinking, and general self-discipline. And would it be
a worthy sacrifice, that to spare some substantial agriculturalists, idle
gentlemen, and sporting or promenading ecclesiastics, such an afflictive
necessity, the actual tillers of the ground, and the workers in
manufacture and mechanics, should continue to be kept in stupid ignorance?
It is very possible this may excite a smile, as the threatening of a
necessity or a danger to these privileged persons, which it is thought
they may be comfortably assured is very remote. This danger (namely, that
a good many of them, or rather of those who are coming in the course of
nature to succeed them in the same rank, will find that its relative
consequence cannot be sustained but at a very considerably higher pitch of
mental qualification) is threatened upon no stronger presages than the
following:--Allow us first to take it for granted, that it is not a very
protracted length of time that is to pass away before the case comes to
be, that a large proportion of the children of the lower classes are
trained, through a course of assiduous instruction and exercise in the
most valuable knowledge, during a series of years, in schools which
everything possible is done to render efficient. Then, if we include in
one computation all the time they will have spent in real mental effort
and acquirement there, and all those pieces and intervals of time which we
may reasonably hope that many of them will improve to the same purpose in
the subsequent years, a very great number of them will have employed, by
the time they reach middle age, many thousands of hours more than people
in their condition have heretofore done, in a way the most directly
tending to place them greatly further on in whatever of importance for
repute and authority intelligence is to bear in society. And how must we
be estimating the natural capacities of these inferior classes, or the
perceptions of the higher, not to foresee as a consequence, that these
latter will find their relative situation greatly altered, with respect to
the measure of knowledge and mental power requisite as one most essential
constituent of their superiority, in order to command the unfeigned
deference of their inferiors?
Our strenuous promoters of the schemes for cultivating the minds of all
the people, are not afraid of professing to foresee, that when schools, of
that completely disciplinarian organization which they are, we hope,
gradually to attain, shall have become general, and shall be vigorously
seconded by all those auxiliary expedients for popular instruction which
are also in progress, a very pleasing modification will become apparent in
the character, the moral color, if we might so express it, of the people's
ordinary employment. The young persons so instructed, being appointed, for
the most part, to the same occupations to which they would have been
destined had they grown up in utter ignorance and vulgarity, are expected
to give evidence that the meanness, the debasement almost, which had
characterized many of those occupations in the view of the more refined
classes, was in truth the debasement of the men more than of the callings;
which will come to be in more honorable estimation as associated with the
sense, decorum, and self-respect of the performers, than they were while
blended and polluted with all the low habits, manners, and language, of
ignorance and vulgar grossness. And besides, there is the consideration of
the different degrees of merit in the performance itself; and who will be
the persons most likely to excel, in the many branches of workmanship and
business which admit of being better done in proportion to the degree of
intelligence directed upon them? And again, who will be most in
requisition for those offices of management and superintendence, where
something must be confided to judgment and discretion, and where the value
is felt, (often vexatiously felt from the want,) of some capacity of
combination and foresight?
Such as these are among the subordinate benefits reasonably, we might say
infallibly, calculated upon. Our philanthropists are confident in
foreseeing also, that very many of these better educated young persons
will be valuable co-operators with all who may be more formally employed
in instruction, against that ignorance from which themselves have been so
happily saved; will exert an influence, by their example and the steady
avowal of their principles, against vice and folly in their vicinity; and
will be useful advisers of their neighbors in their perplexities, and
sometimes moderators in their discords. It is predicted, with a confidence
so much resting on general grounds of probability, as hardly to need the
instances already afforded in various parts of the country to confirm it,
that here and there one of the well-instructed humbler class will become a
competent and useful public teacher of the most important truth. It is, in
short, anticipated with delightful assurance, that great numbers of those
who shall go forth from under the friendly guardianship which will take
the charge of their youthful minds, will be examples through life and at
its conclusion, of the power and felicity of religion.
Here we can suppose it not improbable that some one may, in pointed terms,
put the question,--Do you then, at last, mean to affirm that you can, by
the proposed course, by any course, of discipline, absolutely secure that
effectual operation and ascendency of religion in the mind, which shall
place it in the right condition toward God, and in a state of fitness for
passing, without fear or danger, into the scenes of its future endless
existence?
We think the cautious limitation of language, hitherto observed in setting
forth our expectations, might preclude such a question. But let it be
asked, since there can be no difficulty to reply. We do _not_ affirm that
any form of discipline, the wisest and best in the power of the wisest and
best men to apply, is competent of itself thus to subject the mind
decidedly and permanently to the power of religion. On the contrary, we
believe that grand effect can be accomplished only by a special influence
of the Divine Being, operating by the means applied in a well-judged
system of instruction, or, if he pleases, independently of them. But next,
it is perfectly certain, notwithstanding, that the application of these
human means will, in a multitude of instances, be efficacious to that most
happy end.
This certainty arises from a few very plain general considerations. The
first is, that the whole system of means appointed by the Almighty to be
employed as a human process for presenting religion solemnly in view
before men's minds, and enforcing it on them, is an appointment _expressly
intended_ for working that great effect which secures their final
felicity; though to what extent in point of number is altogether unknown
to the subordinate agents. They are perfectly certain, in employing the
appointed expedients in prosecution of the work, that they must be
proceeding on the strength of a positive relation subsisting between those
means and the results to be realized, in what instances, in what measure,
at what time, it shall please the sovereign Power. The appointment cannot
be one of mere exercise for the faculties and submissive obedience of
those who are summoned to be active in its execution.
Accordingly, there are in the divine revelation very many explicit and
animating assurances, that their exertions shall certainly be in a measure
effectual to the proposed end. And if these assurances are made in favor
of the exertions for inculcating religion generally, that is, on men of
all conditions and ages, they may be assumed as giving special
encouragement to those for impressing it on young minds, before they can
be preoccupied and hardened by the depravities of the world. There is
plainly the more hope for the efficacy of those exertions the less there
is to frustrate them. But besides, the authority itself, which has assured
a measure of success to religious instruction as administered generally,
has marked with peculiar strength the promise of its success as applied to
the young; thus affording rays of hope which have in ten thousand
instances animated the diligence of pious parents, and the other
benevolent instructors of children.
There is also palpable matter of fact to the point, that an education
which combines the discipline of the conscience and the intellectual
faculty will be rendered, in many instances, efficacious to the formation
of a religious character. This obvious fact is, that a much greater
proportion of the persons so educated do actually become the subjects of
religion, than of a similar number of those brought up in ignorance and
profligacy. Take collectively any number of families in which such an
education prevails, and the same number in which it does not, and follow
the young persons respectively into subsequent life. But any one who hears
the suggestion, feels there is no need to wait the lapse of time and
follow their actual course. As instructed by what he has already seen in
society, he can go forward with them prophetically, with perfect certainty
that many more of the one tribe than that of the other, will become
persons not only of moral respectability but decided piety. Any one that
should assert respecting them that the probabilities are equal and
indifferent, would be considered as sporting a wilful absurdity, or
betraying that he is one of those who did not come into the world for
anything they can learn in it. And the experience which thus authorizes a
perfect confidence of prediction, is evidence that, though discipline must
wholly disclaim an absolute power to effect the great object in question,
there is, nevertheless, such a constitution of things that it most
certainly will, as an instrumental cause, in many instances effect it.
The state of the matter, then, is very simple. The Supreme Cause of men's
being "made wise to salvation," in appointing a system of means, to be put
by human activity in operation toward this effect, has also appointed that
in this operation they shall infallibly be attended with a measure of
success in accomplishing that highest good,--a measure which was not to be
accomplished otherwise than by such means. So much he has signified to men
as an absolute certainty: but then, he has connected this certainty in an
arbitrary, and as to our knowledge, indefinite manner with the system. It
is a certainty connected with the system _as taken generally and
comprehensively_; and which it is not given to us to affix to the
particular instances in which the success will take place. It is a Divine
Volition suspended over the whole scene of cultivation; like a cloud from
which we cannot tell where precisely the shower to fertilize it will fall,
certain, however, that there are spots whose verdure and flowers will tell
after awhile. The agents under the Sovereign Dispenser are to proceed on
this positive assurance that the success _shall be somewhere_, though they
cannot know that it will be in this one instance, or in the other: "In the
morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand; for thou
knowest not whether shall prosper, this, or that." If they rate the value
of their agency so high, as to hold it derogatory to their dignity that
any part of their labors should be performed under the condition of
possibly being unsuccessful, they may be assured that such is not exactly
the estimate of Him to whom they look for the acceptance of their
services, and for the reward.
But it may be added, that the great majority of those who are intent on
the schemes for enlightening and reforming mankind, are entertaining a
confident hope of the approach of a period, when the success will be far
greater in proportion to the measure of exertion in every department of
the system of instrumentality for that grand object. We cherish this
confidence, not on the strength of any pretension to be able to resolve
prophetic emblems and numbers, into precise dates and events of the
present and approaching times. It rests on a more general mode of
apprehending a relation between the extraordinary indications of the
period we live in, and the substantial purport of the divine predictions.
There unquestionably gleams forth, through the plainer lines, and through
the mystical imagery of prophecy, the vision of a better age, in which the
application of the truths of religion to men's minds will be irresistible.
And what should more naturally be interpreted as one of the dawning signs
of its approach, than a new spirit come into action with insuppressible
impulse, at once to dispel the fog from their intellects and bring the
heavenly light to shine close upon them; accompanied by a prodigious
convulsion in the old system of the world, which hardly recognized in the
inferior millions the very existence of souls to need or be worth such an
illumination? It is true that an eruptive activity of evil, beyond what
was witnessed by our forefathers, has attended and followed that
convulsion; as mephitic exhalations are emitted through the rents of an
earthquake. Viewed in itself, this outbreak of the bad principles and
passions might seem to portend anything rather than a grand improvement in
the state of a nation or of mankind. It appears like an actual
augmentation of the evil previously existing. But it should rather be
regarded as the setting loose of the noxious elements accumulated and
rankling under the old system; a phenomenon inevitably attendant on its
breaking up, by a catastrophe absolutely necessary to open and clear the
field for operations on the great scale against those evils themselves,
and to give scope and means for the advancement toward a better condition
of humanity.
The laborers in the institutions for instructing the young descendants of
an ill-fated generation, may often regret to perceive how little the
process is as yet informed with the energy which is ultimately to pervade
the world. But let them regard as one great undivided economy and train of
operation, these initiatory efforts and all that is to follow, till that
time "when all shall know the Lord;" and take by anticipation, as in
fraternity with the happier future laborers, their just share of that
ultimate triumph. Those active spirits, in the happier periods, will look
back with this sentiment of kindred and complacency to those who sustained
the earlier toils of the good cause, and did not suffer their zeal to
languish under the comparative smallness of their success.
* * * * *
We shall conclude with a few sentences in the way of reply to another
question, which we can surmise there may be persons ready to ask, after
this long iteration of the assertion of the necessity of knowledge to the
common people. The question would be to this effect: What do you, all this
while, mean to assign as the _measure_ of knowledge proper for the people
to be put in possession of?--for you do not specify the kinds, or limit
the extent: you talk in vague general terms of mental improvement; you
leave the whole matter indefinite; and for all that appears, the people
are never to know when they know enough.
It is answered, that we _do_ leave the extent undefined, and should
request to be informed where, and why, the line of circumscription and
exclusion should be drawn.
Is it, we could really wish to know, a point at all yet decided, wherein
consist the value and importance of the human nature? Any liberal scheme
for its universal cultivation is met by such a jealous parsimony toward
the common people, such a ready imputation of wild theory, such protesting
declamations against the mischief of practically applying abstract
principles, such an undisguised or betrayed precedence given to mere
interests of state, and those perhaps very sordid ones, before all others,
and such whimsical prescriptions for making a salutary compound of a
little knowledge and much ignorance,--that it might seem to be doubtful,
after all, whether the human nature, in the mass of mankind at least, be
of any such consistence, or for any such purpose, as is affirmed in our
common-places on the subject. It is uniformly assumed in the language of
divines, and of the philosophers in most repute, that the worth, the
dignity, the importance of man, are in his rational, immortal nature; and
that therefore the best condition of _that_ is his true felicity and
glory, and the object chiefly to be aimed at in all that is done by him,
and for him, on earth. But whether this should be regarded as anything
more than the elated faith of ascetics, a fine dogma of academics, or a
theme for show in the pomp of moral rhetoric? For we often see, and it is
very striking to see, how principles which are suffered to pass for
infallible truth while content to stay within the province of speculation,
and to be pronounced as mere doctrine, may be disowned and repelled when
they come demanding to have their appropriate place and influence in the
practical sphere. Even many pretended advocates of Christianity, who in
naming certain principles would seem to make them of the very essence of
the moral part of that religion, and, in discoursing merely as
_religionists_, will insist on their vital importance, will yet shuffle
and equivocate about these principles, and in effect set them aside, when
they are attempted to be applied to some of their most legitimate uses.
If, for example, these religionists are among the servile adherents of
corrupted institutions and iniquity invested with power, they will easily
find accommodating interpretations, or pleas of exemption from the direct
authority, of some of the most sacred maxims of their professed religion.
Serve the true God when we happen to be in the right place; but at all
events we must attend our master to pay homage in the temple of Eimmon,
or, should he please to require it, that of Moloch,--with this signal
difference from the ancient instance of peccant servility, that whereas in
that case pardon for it was implored, in the present case a merit is made
of the sycophancy and the idolatry. Unless the principles of Christianity
will acknowledge the supremacy of _something else_ than Christianity, in
the mode of their application to estimate the importance of the popular
mind, they may take their repose in bodies of divinity, sermons,
catechisms, systems of ethics, or wherever they can find a place.
But _is_ it really admitted, as a great principle for practical
application, that the mind, the intelligent, imperishable existence, is
the supremely valuable thing in man? It is then admitted, inevitably, that
the discipline, the correction, the improvement, the maturation of this
spiritual being to the highest attainable degree, is the great object to
be desired by men, for themselves and one another. That is to say, that
knowledge, cultivation, salutary exercise, wisdom, all that can conduce to
the perfection of the mind, form the state in which it is due to man's
nature that he should be endeavored to be placed. But then, this is due to
his nature by an absolutely _general_ law. He cannot be so circumstanced
in the order of society that this shall _not_ be due to it. No situation
in which the arrangements of the world, or say of Providence, may place
him, can constitute him a specific kind of creature, to which is no longer
fit and necessary that which is necessary to the well-being of man
considered generally, as a spiritual, immortal nature. The essential law
of this nature cannot be abrogated by men's being placed in humble and
narrow circumstances, in which a very large portion of their time and
exertions are required for mere subsistence. This accident of a confined
situation is no more a reason why their minds should not require the best
attainable cultivation, than would be the circumstance that the body in
which a man's mind is lodged happens to be of smaller dimensions than
those of other men.
That under the disadvantages of this humble situation they _cannot_
acquire all the mental improvement, desirable for the perfection of their
intelligent nature, that the situation renders it impracticable, is quite
another matter. So far as this inhibition is real and absolute, that is,
so far as it must remain after the best exertion of human wisdom and means
in their favor, it must be submitted to as one of the infelicities of
their allotment by Providence. What we are insisting on is, that since by
the law of their nature there is to them the same general necessity as to
any other human beings, of that which is essential to the well-being of
the mind, they should be advanced in this improvement _as far as they
can_; that is, as far as a wise and benevolent disposition of the
community can make it practicable for them to be advanced.
It is an odious hypocrisy to talk of the narrow limits to this advancement
as an ordination of Providence, when a well-ordered constitution and
management of the community might enlarge those limits. At least it is so
in the _justifiers_ of that social system: those who deplore and condemn
it _may_ properly speak of the appointment of Providence, but in another
sense; as they would speak of the dispensations of Providence in
consolation to a man iniquitously imprisoned or impoverished.
Let the people then be advanced in the improvement of their rational
nature as far as they can. A greater degree of this progress will be more
for their welfare than a less. This might be shown in forms of
illustration easily conceived, and as easily vindicated from the
imputation of extravagance, by instances which every observer may have met
with in real life. A poor man, cultivated in a small degree, has acquired
a few just ideas of an important subject, which lies out of the scope of
his daily employments for subsistence. Be that subject what it may, if
those ideas are of any use to him, by what principle would one idea more,
or two, or twenty, be of _no_ use to him? Of no use!--when all the
thinking world knows, that every additional clear idea of a subject is
valuable by a ratio of progress greater than that of the mere numerical
increase, and that by a large addition of ideas a man triples the value of
those with which he began. He has read a small meagre tract on the
subject, or perhaps only an article in a magazine, or an essay in the
literary column of a provincial newspaper. Where would be the harm, on
supposition he can fairly afford the time, in consequence of husbanding it
for this very purpose, of his reading a well-written concise book, which
would give him a clear, comprehensive view of the subject?
But perhaps another branch of the tree of knowledge bends its fruit
temptingly to his hand. And if he should indulge, and gain a tolerably
clear notion of one more interesting subject, (still punctually regardful
of the duties of his ordinary vocation,) where, we say again, is the harm?
Converse with him; observe his conduct; compare him with the wretched
clown in a neighboring dwelling; and say that he is the worse for having
thus much of the provision for a mental subsistence. But if thus much has
contributed greatly to his advantage, why should he be interdicted still
further attainments? Are you alarmed for him, if he will needs go the
length of acquiring some knowledge of geography, the solar system, and the
history of his own country and of the ancient world? [Footnote: These
denominations of knowledge, so strange as they will to some person?
appear, in such a connection, we have ventured to write from, observing
that they stand in the schemes of elementary instruction in the Missionary
schools for the children of the natives of Bengal. But of course we are to
acknowledge, that the vigorous, high-toned spirits of those Asiatic
idolaters are adapted to receive a much superior style of cultivation to
any of which the feeble progeny of England can be supposed to be capable.]
Let him proceed; supply him gratuitously with some of the best books on
these subjects; and if you shall converse with him again, after another
year or two of his progress, and compare him once more with the ignorant,
stunted, cankered beings in his vicinity, you will see whether there be
anything essentially at variance between his narrow circumstances in life
and his mental enlargement.
You are willing, perhaps, that he _should_ know a few facts of ancient
times, and can, though with hesitation, trust him with some such slight
stories as Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and Rome. But if he should then
by some means find his way into such a work as that of Rollin, (of moral
and instructive tendency, however defective otherwise,) or betray that he
covets an acquaintance with those of Gillies, or even Thirlwall,--it is
all over with him for being a useful member of society in his humble
situation. You would consent (may we suppose?) to his reading a slender
abridgment of voyages and travels; but what _is_ to become of him if
nothing less will content him than the whole-length story of Captain Cook?
He will direct, it is to be hoped, some of his best attention to the
supreme subject of religion. And you would quite approve of his perusing
some useful tracts, some manuals of piety, some commentary on a catechism,
some volume of serious, plain discourses; but he is absolutely undone if
his ambition should rise at length to Barrow, or Howe, or Jeremy Taylor.
[Footnote: It should be unnecessary to observe, that the object in citing
_any_ names in this paragraph was, to give a somewhat definite cast to the
description of the supposed progress of the plebeian self-instructor. The
principal of them are mentioned simply as being of such note in their
departments, that he would be likely to hear of them among the first of
the authors to be sought, if he were aspiring to something beyond his
previously humble and abridged reading. The reader may substitute for
these names any others, of the superior order, that he may think more
proper to stand in their place. It would therefore be animadversion or
ridicule misspent, to make the charge of extravagance on this imagined
course of a plain man's reading, with a specific reference to the authors
here named, as if it had been meant that precisely these, by a peculiar
selection, were to be the authors he may be supposed to peruse, and in
perusing, to waste his time and destroy his sense of duty.] He is by all
means, you say, to be kept out of all such pernicious company, in which it
is impossible he can learn any lesson but one,--an aversion to good
morals, just laws, virtuous kings, a polished and benevolent gentry, and
learned and pious teachers. Well; _let_ him be kept as far as possible
from the mischief of all such books and knowledge; let him hardly know
that there _was_ an ancient world, or that there _are_ on the globe such
regions and wonders as travellers have described; or that a reason and
eloquence above the pitch of some plain homily ever illustrated and
enforced religion. _Let_ him keep clear of all such evil communications;
and then, (since we were expressly making it a condition, that he can
fairly spare the time for such reading from his common employment,) and
then,--he will have just so much the more time for needless sleep, for
discussing the trifles and characters of the neighborhood, or, (supposing
him still of a religious habit,) for tiring his friends and family with
the well-meant but very unattractive iteration of a few serious phrases
and remarks, of which they will have long since learnt to anticipate the
last word from hearing the first. Advantages like these he certainly may
enjoy in consequence of his preclusion from the higher and wider field of
ideas. But however valuable these may be in themselves, they will not
ensure his being better qualified for the common business and proprieties
of his station, than another man in the same sphere of life whose mind has
acquired that larger reach which we are describing. It is no more than
what we have repeatedly seen exemplified, when we represent this
transgressor into the prohibited field as probably acquitting himself with
exemplary regularity and industry in his allotted labors, and even in this
very capacity preferred by the men of business to the illiterate tools in
his neighborhood; nay, most likely preferred, in the more technical sense
of the word, to the honorable, but often sufficiently vexatious office of
directing and superintending the operations of those tools.
And where, now, is the evil he is incurring or causing, during this
progress of violating, step after step, the circumscription by which the
aristocratic compasses were again and again, with small reluctant
extensions to successive greater distances, defining the scope of the
knowledge proper for a man of his condition? It is a bad thing, is it,
that he has a multiplicity of ideas to relieve the tedium incident to the
sameness of his course of life; that, with many things which had else been
but mere insignificant facts, or plain dry notions and principles, he has
a variety of interesting associations; like woodbines and roses wreathing
round the otherwise bare, ungraceful forms of erect stones or withered
trees; that the world is an interpreted and intelligible volume before his
eyes; that he has a power of applying himself to _think_ of what it
becomes at any time necessary for him to understand? Is it a judgment upon
him for his temerity, in "seeking and intermeddling with wisdom" with
which he had no business, that he has so much to impart to his children as
they are growing up, and that if some of them are already come to
maturity, they know not where to find a man to respect more than their
father? Or if he takes a part in the converse and devotional exercises of
religious society, is no one there the better for the clearness and the
plenitude of his thoughts and the propriety of his expression?--But there
would be no end of the preposterous suppositions fairly attachable to the
notion, that the mental improvement of the common people has some proper
limit of arbitrary prescription, on the ground simply of their _being_ the
common people, and quite distinct from the restriction which their
circumstances may invincibly impose on their ability.
Taken in this latter view, we acknowledge that their condition would be a
subject for most melancholy contemplation,--if we did not hope for better
times. The benevolent reflector, when sometimes led to survey in thought
the endless myriads of beings with minds within the circuit of a country
like this, will have a momentary vision of them as they would be if all
improved to the highest mental condition to which it is _naturally
possible_ for them to be exalted a magnificent spectacle; but it instantly
fades and vanishes. And the sense is so powerfully upon him of the
unchangeable economy of the world, which, even if the fairest visions of
the millennium itself were realized, would still render such a thing
_actually_ impossible, that he hardly regrets the bright scene was but a
beautiful _mirage_, and melts away. His imagination then descends to view
this immense tribe of rational beings in another, and comparatively
moderate state of the cultivation of their faculties, a state not
one-third part so lofty as that in which he had beheld all the individuals
improved to the utmost of their natural capacity; and he thinks, that the
condition of man's abode on earth _might_ admit of their being raised to
_this_ elevation. But he soon sees that, till a mighty change shall come
on the management of the affairs of nations, this too is impossible; and
with regret he sees even this inferior ideal spectacle pass away, to rest
on an age in distant prospect. At last he takes his imaginary stand on
what he feels to be a very low level of the supposed improvement of the
general popular mind; and he says, Thus much, at the least, should be a
possibility allowed by the circumstances of the people under _any_
tolerable disposition of national interests;--and then he turns to look
down on an actual condition in which care, and toil, and distress, render
it impossible for a great proportion of the people to reach, or even
approach, this his last and lowest conception of what the state of their
minds ought to be.
In spite of all the optimists, it _is_ a grievous reflection, after the
race has had on earth so many thousands of years for attaining its most
advantageous condition there, that all the experience, the philosophy, the
science, the art, the power acquired by mind over matter,--that all the
contributions of all departed and all present spirits and bodies, yes, and
all religion too, should have come but to this;--to this, that in what is
self-adulated as the most favored and improved nation of all terrestrial
space and time, a vast proportion of the people are found in a condition
which confines them, with all the rigor of necessity, to a mere childhood
of intelligent existence, without its innocence.
But at the very same time, and while the compassion rises, at such a view,
there comes in on the other hand the reflection, that even in the actual
state of things, there are a considerable number of the people who _might_
acquire a valuable share of improvement which they do not. Great numbers
of them, grown up, waste by choice, and multitudes of children waste
through utter neglect, a large quantity of precious time which their
narrow circumstances still leave free from the iron dominion of necessity.
And they will waste it, it is certain that they will, till education shall
have become general, and much more vigorous in discipline. If through a
miracle there were to come down on this country, with a sudden, delightful
affluence of temporal melioration, resembling the vernal transformation
from the dreariness of winter, a universal prosperity, so that all should
be placed in comparative ease and plenty, it would require another miracle
to prevent this benignity of heaven from turning to a dreadful mischief.
What would the great tribe of the uneducated people do with the half of
their time, which we will suppose that such a state would give to their
voluntary disposal? Every one can answer infallibly, that the far greater
number of them would consume it in idleness, vanity or every sort of
intemperance. Educate them, then, bring them under a grand process of
intellectual and moral reformation;--or, in all circumstances and events,
calamitous or prosperous, they are still a race made in vain!
In taking leave of the subject, we wish to express, in strong terms, the
applause and felicitations due to those excellent individuals, found here
and there, who In very humble circumstances, and perhaps with very little
advantage of education in their youth, have been excited to a strenuous,
continued exertion for the improvement of their minds; and thus have made
(the unfavorable situation considered,) admirable attainments, which are
verifying to them that "knowledge is power," over rich resources for their
own enjoyment, and are in many instances passing with inestimable worth
into the instruction of their families, and a variety of usefulness within
their sphere. They have nobly struggled with their threatened destiny, and
have overcome it. When they think, with regret, how confined, after all,
is their portion of knowledge, as compared with the possessions of those
who have had from their infancy all facilities and the amplest time for
its acquirement, let them be consoled by reflecting, that the value of
mental progress is not to be measured solely by the quantity of knowledge
possessed, but partly, and indeed still more, in the corrective,
invigorating effect produced on the mental powers by the resolute
exertions made in attaining it. And therefore, since, under their great
disadvantages, it has required a much greater degree of this resolute
exertion in them to force their way victoriously out of ignorance, than it
has required in those who have had everything in their favor to make a
long, free career over the field of knowledge, they may be assured they
possess one greater benefit in _proportion_ to the measure of their
acquirements. This persistence of a determined will to do what has been so
difficult to be done, has infused a peculiar energy into the exercise of
their powers; a valuable compensation, in part, for their more limited
share of the advantage that one part of knowledge becomes more valuable in
itself by the accession of many others. Let them persevere in this worthy
self-discipline, appropriate to the introductory period of an endless
mental life. Let them go on to complete the proof how much a mind incited
to a high purpose may triumph over a depression of its external
condition;--but solemnly taking care, that all their improvements may tend
to such a result, that at length the rigor of their lot and the
confinement of mortality itself bursting at once from around them, may
give them to those intellectual revelations, that everlasting sunlight of
the soul, in which the truly wise will expand all their faculties in a
happier economy.
The End.