My theme is one in which bright-eyed Hope must clasp the hand of blind
Despair, and lead the way to better things.
* * * * *
I am to talk about what can be done for little waifs after they are
born. By what process of education and development are they to be made
valuable members of society? The doctrine that the hereditary
defectiveness of the masses can be corrected by education and
hereditary culture is the true doctrine. Any system of education that
does not contemplate these results does not deserve the name of
education. What the world most needs to-day is character--genuine
character. In order to secure this, we must get hold of the little
waifs that now grow up to form the criminal element just as early in
life as possible. Hunt up the children of poverty, of crime, and of
brutality, just as soon as they can be reached--the children that
flock in the tenement houses, on the narrow, dirty streets; the
children that have no one to call them by dear names; children that
are buffeted hither and thither,--"flotsam and jetsam on the wild, mad
sea of life." This is the element out of which criminals are made.
It was Juvenal who said, "The man's character is made at seven: what
he is then he will always be." This seems a sweeping assertion; but
Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Lycurgus, Bacon, Locke, and Lord Brougham,
all emphasize the same idea. Leading educators of a modern day are all
united upon this point. The pliable period of early childhood is the
time most favorable to the eradication of vicious tendencies, and to
the development of the latent possibilities for good. The foundations
for national prosperity and perpetuity are to be laid deep down in our
infant schools. And the infant school, to be most successful, must be
organized and carried forward on the kindergarten plan. The
kindergarten has rightfully been termed the "paradise of childhood."
It is the gate through which many a little outcast has re-entered
Eden.
Froebel, that great and beloved apostle of childhood, founded a system
that is destined to revolutionize all former methods of developing
little children. His battle-cry was, "Come! let us live with our
children!"
The simple, salient fact is, we do not get hold of the little children
of vice and of crime _soon enough_. An unfortunate childhood is the
sure prophecy of an unfortunate life. "Implant lessons of virtue and
well-doing in earliest childhood," says Plato. "Give me the child,"
says Lord Bacon, "and the State shall have the man." "Let the very
playthings of your children have a bearing upon the life and work of
the coming man," says Aristotle. "It is early training that makes the
master," says the great German poet. "Train up a child in the way he
should go, and, when he is old, he will not depart from it," says the
Revealed Word. Let us take heed to these entreaties, and work with the
children. Work with little children will always pay handsome dividends
to the family, to the community, to the State, and to the world.
It is Ruskin who says, "The true history of a nation is not of its
wars, but of its households;" and he holds it to be the duty of a
State to see that every child born therein shall be well housed,
clothed, fed and educated, till it attain years of discretion. But he
admits that, in order to accomplish this, the government must have an
authority over the welfare of children of which we do not now so much
as dream.
Whether such a view be practical or not, one thing is certain: nothing
but virtue and intelligence can save a republic from ending in
despotism, corruption, and anarchy. There must be genuine character.
And, since virtue is secured by early training and habit, the children
of a republic must be trained in ways of honesty, industry and
self-control. It matters not who they are nor where they are, the
State cannot afford to allow them to grow up in ignorance and crime.
The great conspirator, when he aimed to overthrow Rome, corrupted the
young men. When our fathers would conserve liberty for their children
and for mankind, they "fed the lambs": they looked to the proper
training of the young. We have a vast number of humane institutions
for the reclamation and recovery of the wayward and the erring. We
have reformatory institutions, asylums, prisons, jails, and houses of
correction; but all these are only repair shops. Their work is
secondary, not primal. It is vastly more economical to build new
structures than to overhaul and remodel old ones.
The prevention of crime is the duty of society. But society has little
right to punish crime at one end, if it does nothing to prevent it at
the other end. Society's chief concern should be to remove the causes
from which crime springs. It is much more a duty to prevent crime than
it is to punish crime.
Parents should try to be what they would have their children to be.
Parents and society are very clumsy in their management of children.
We have our duties to one another; and we may be sure of one thing:
that any one, however flippant or however scornful, who asks, like
Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?" like Cain, has somehow lost his
brother; like Cain, has somehow slain him. It seems to me that two
great ministrant forces engird this universe--love and law. We need
them both in the education and development of human beings--of little
children. The mother love should bind the child to home and duty: the
father power should construct order and administer government. Society
should have both these elements in its government.
As factors in society, what are we doing to prevent crime? We may be
very eloquent in pleading that punishments may be quick, sharp, and
decisive, that the gallows may have every victim that it claims by
law, and that eternal vigilance may be kept on evil-doers. But all
this will not avail. As has truly been said: "Crime cannot be
prevented by punishment. Crime can only be hindered by letting no
child grow up a criminal. Crime can only be stayed by education--not
education of the intellect only, but education of the heart, which is
alike good and necessary for all." We want that sort of education
which has in it more of the aim of character-building.
The end of all culture must be character, and its outcome in conduct.
"Conduct," says Matthew Arnold, "is three-fourths of life." The
State's concern in education is to rear virtuous, law-abiding,
self-governing citizens.
I repeat it, the doctrine that the hereditary defectiveness of the
masses can be corrected, both by culture and by education, is the true
doctrine. Virtue, integrity, and well-doing are not sufficiently aimed
at in earliest childhood. The head, and not the heart, comes in for
the maximum of training. And yet right action is far more important
than rare scholarship. The foundations of national prosperity and
perpetuity are laid deep down in the bed-rock of individual character.
Let the plodding, the thriftless, and the unaspiring of any country
have the monopoly of peopling that country, and the race will
gradually deteriorate, until finally the whole social fabric gives
way, and the nation reverts back to barbarism or is blotted from the
earth. When a nation exceeds more in quantity than in quality, it is
in a bad plight. Ignorance and lack of character in the masses will
never breed wisdom so long as ignorance and lack of character in the
individual breed folly. The intelligent tradesman, the thrifty
mechanic, and the sturdy yeomanry constitute the foundation of a
nation--the proud assurance of her perpetuity, her prosperity, and her
strength.
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied."
I tell you, friends, we do not half comprehend the importance of
looking after the unfortunate children of our streets. What said the
great and good Teacher on this subject? "Take heed that ye despise not
one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their
angels do always behold the face of My Father who is in heaven." And
when I see the neglected, sad-faced, prematurely old, weary-eyed
little ones, in the purlieus of vice and crime, there is just one
thought, that comes like a ray of sunlight through the rifts of cloud,
and it is this: There is not one of these uncombed, unwashed, untaught
little pensioners of care that has not some kind angel heart that is
pitying it in the heavens above. Parents may be harsh and brutal,
communities may be cold and neglectful; but the angels must ever
regard them with eyes luminous with tender pity.
What shall we do with these children? Good people everywhere should
combine to care for them and teach them. Churches should make it an
important part of their work to look after them. The law of
self-preservation, if no higher law, demands that they should be
looked after. How shall they be looked after? By establishing free
kindergartens in every destitute part of large cities.
Said a wealthy tax-payer to me recently, as he paid me his monthly
kindergarten subscription: "Mrs. Cooper, this work among the children
is the best work that can be done. I give you this aid most gladly. I
consider it an investment for my children. I would rather give five
dollars a month to educate these children than to have my own taxed
ten times that amount by and by to sustain prisons and
penitentiaries." This was the practical view of a practical business
man--a man of wise forethought and of generous, genial impulses. Many
needy children have been turned back into the street, to learn all its
vice and crime, who could not find accommodation in the different
charity kindergartens. I tell you this is a fact of momentous import
to any community. Remember that from a single neglected child in a
wealthy county in the State of New York there has come a notorious
stock of criminals, vagabonds and paupers, imperilling every dollar's
worth of property and every individual in the community. Not less than
twelve hundred persons have been traced as the lineage of six children
who were born of this one perverted and depraved woman, who was once a
pure, sweet, dimpled little child, and who, with proper influences
thrown about her at a tender age, might have given to the world twelve
hundred progeny who would have blest their day and generation. Look at
the tremendous fact involved! In neglecting to train this one child to
ways of virtue and well-doing, the descendants of the respectable
neighbors of that child have been compelled to endure the
depredations, and support in almshouses and prisons, scores of her
descendants for six generations! If the people of this country would
protect the virtue of their children, their persons from murder, their
property from theft, or their wealth from a heavy tax to support
paupers and criminals, they must provide a scheme of education that
will not allow a single youth to escape its influence. And, to effect
the surest and best results, these children must be reached just as
early in life as possible. The design of the kindergarten system is to
prevent criminals. And what estimate shall be placed upon an
instrumentality which saves the child from becoming a criminal, and
thus not only saves the State from the care and expense incident to
such reform, but also secures to the State all that which the life of
a good citizen brings to it? Think of the vast difference in results,
had there been twelve hundred useful, well-equipped men and women at
work in that county in New York, building it up in productive
industries, instead of twelve hundred paupers and criminals tearing
down and defiling the fair heritage! We have but to look at this
significant fact to estimate the value of a single child to the
commonwealth.
The true kindergartner proceeds upon the principle asserted by
Froebel, that every child is a child of nature, a child of man, and a
child of God, and that education can fulfil its mission only when it
views the human being in this threefold relation, and takes each into
account. In other words, the true kindergartner regards with
scrupulous care the physical, the intellectual, and the moral. "You
cannot," says Froebel, "do heroic deeds in words, or by talking about
them; but you can educate a child to self-activity and to well-doing,
and through these to a faith which will not be dead." The child in the
kindergarten is not only _told_ to be good, but inspired by help and
sympathy to _be_ good. The kindergarten child is taught to manifest
his love in deeds rather than in words; and a child thus taught never
knows lip-service, but is led forward to that higher form of service
where their good works glorify the Father, thus proving Froebel's
assertion to be true, where he says, "I have based my education on
religion, and it must lead to religion." The little child, after all,
is the important factor in this universe.
When the old king demanded of the Spartans fifty of their children as
hostages, they replied, "We would prefer to give you a hundred of our
most distinguished men." This was but a fair testimony to the
everlasting value of the child to any commonwealth and to any age. The
hope of the world lies in the children. The hope of this nation lies
in the little children that throng the streets to-day. Is it no small
question, then, "What shall we do with our children?" It seems to me
that the very best work that can be done for the world is work with
the children. We talk a vast deal about the work of reclamation and
restoration, reformatory institutions and the like; and all this is
well, but far better is it to begin at the beginning. The best
physicians are not those who only follow disease, but those who, as
far as possible, go ahead and prevent it. They seek to teach the
community the laws of health,--how not to get sick.
We too often start out on the principle that actuated the medical tyro
who was working, might and main, over a patient burning up with fever.
When gently entreated to know what he was doing, he snappishly
replied: "Doing? Why, I'm trying to throw this man into a fit. I don't
know much about curing fevers, but I'm death on fits. Just let me get
him into a fit, and I'll fetch him!" It seems to me we often go on the
same principle: we work harder in laying plans to redeem those who
have fallen than to save others from falling. We seem to take it for
granted that a certain condition of declension must be reached before
we can work to advantage. I repeat again what I have said before--_we
do not begin soon enough with the children_. It seems to me that both
Church and State have yet to learn the vast import of those matchless
words of the great Teacher Himself, where He said, pointing to a
little child, "He that receiveth him in My name receiveth Me." He said
it because, with omniscient vision, He saw the wondrous, folded-away
possibilities imprisoned within the little child.
Now, I do not propose to go into the _rationale_ of the kindergarten
system at all on this occasion; but I do wish to emphasize a few
salient points; and, first, that the kindergarten aims at the
cultivation of the heart. As its great founder himself declared, its
regnant aim is to guide the heart and soul in the right direction, and
lead them to the Creator of all life, and to personal union with Him.
As I before said, the kindergarten is the paradise of childhood, the
gate through which the little children may re-enter Eden. The law of
duty is recognized by the little ones as the law of love. Froebel
recognized the Divine Spirit as the true developing power. His theory
was that the human heart can only be satisfied with the consciousness
of the love of a personal God and Father, to whom we can pray and
speak. He said religious _education_ was _more_ than religious
_instruction_. It was his aim to lead the little ones to their
heavenly Friend. He taught them to love one another, to help one
another, to be kind to one another, to care for one another. No one
can love God who does not love his fellows. Froebel grieved over the
criminal classes. We say again, the design of the kindergarten is to
PREVENT criminals. And what estimate shall be placed upon an
instrumentality which saves the child from becoming a criminal, and so
saves the State from the care and expense incident to such reform, and
secures to the State all that which the life of a good citizen brings
to it?
The State begins _too late_ when it permits the child to enter the
public school at six years of age. It is locking the stable door after
the horse is stolen.
One of the most distinguished writers on the law of heredity, Doctor
Maudsley, says: "It is certain that lunatics and criminals are as much
manufactured articles as are steam-engines and calico printing
machines, only the processes of the organic manufactory are so complex
that we are not able to follow them. They are neither accidents nor
anomalies in the universe, but come by law and testify to causality;
and it is the business of science to find out what the causes are, and
by what laws they work." A republic that expects to survive, and to
increase in power and greatness, must see to it that she does not
carry within her the seeds of her own dissolution. It remains forever
true of nations, as of individuals, that ignorance and crime breed
dissolution and death.
I want to say that the men and women who indorse, sustain, and
advocate kindergarten work in San Francisco are among its most
thoughtful, philanthropic, and far-seeing citizens--men who seek to
crown with ceaseless blessing the destinies of this western world, men
and women whose better nature is always within call, and who, with a
rich and mellow spirit of humanity, determine to leave the world
better than they found it, happier and nobler for the legacy of their
fruitful lives; men and women who are always devising generous things,
and who go through life like a band of music; men and women who live
to develop the resources of a great State--citizens of the world made
by the time to make a new time. Such are the men and women who, by
their generous gifts and pleading earnestness, help on this great work
in San Francisco. Noble, far-seeing men and women! I love and honor
them, every one.
Dear friends, I believe with all my soul that the shortest cut to
permanent victory in the great and glorious cause of temperance is
through the training of very little children in ways of virtue,
self-government, and self-control, by the proper cultivation of the
heart, as well as the head and hand, in the kindergarten. Only such
schools as these, moulding and shaping character by careful habit and
training, will ever build up a vigorous, healthful, virtuous national
life. Only such schools as these will make poorhouses, insane asylums,
penitentiaries, and like institutions unnecessary. Do they cost too
much? Think of it! $50,000,000 invested for asylums, poorhouses,
hospitals, blind, deaf-mute, and insane asylums in the State of New
York alone, with an annual outlay of $10,000,000; and this does not
include houses of correction, penitentiaries, prisons, jails, and the
like. Even a portion of this money expended in kindergarten schools
would make these penal and corrective institutions unnecessary in a
few years.
If the civil authorities cannot and do not attend to the needy,
neglected children that go to swell the great lists of crime,
pauperism, and insanity, then Christian philanthropy should do it.
Christianity, thank God, is coming to be more and more practical in
its aspect and work. We are coming to feel more and more that a
religion that has everything for a future world, and nothing for this
world, has nothing for either. A religion that neglects this present
life is a mother who neglects her infant, with the expectation that
manhood will make everything right. There is a class of persons who
spend their lives in trying to _be_ good. There is another class
who spend their lives in trying to _do_ good. Genuine goodness is
something more than a mere self-seeking for eternity. It is something
more than that sort of pious living which means little else than a
safe and sagacious investment in the skies. It is a working together
with God in this world for the uplifting and advancement of the human
race. It is a seeking to lessen the pains and burdens of life among
the toilers and the strugglers. It is a reaching out after the little
children of poverty and want--the hapless little ones who have been
hurled prematurely against the life-wrecking problems of existence.
Help that can run to help the helpless, and comfort the comfortless,
always keeps closest by the side of God. Intensity of life is
intensity of helpfulness. The great waiting world understands good
actions far more readily than abstract doctrines.
Perhaps we shall find at last, in the day of final disclosure, that
the deepest and most far-reaching influence that we ever exerted was
the influence that we exerted over the helpless and neglected little
children of the streets. Perhaps we shall find it to be the best work
we ever accomplished. At all events, it is well to live well. And he
lives the longest who lives the best. He is great who confers most of
blessing on mankind.