I suppose your Secretary was well warranted in announcing my name,
for early in the summer I made an engagement to prepare a paper
to be read here to-night on Christian education in the South; but
the occupations of the last four weeks, as imperative as they were
unexpected, have put it entirely out of my power to comply with
my engagement, as I informed your Secretary yesterday. But with a
persistence which certainly affords a very good illustration of the
doctrine of the “perseverance of the saints,” he has compelled me
to come here to make my excuse in person.
I have not come at this late hour of the evening to enter upon an
argument in favor of what I am sure every person within the sound
of my voice is now thoroughly convinced of, but rather to express
my gratitude and honor at the great work which is now going on in
this country for a Christian education in the West and South, in
which the American Missionary Association is so nobly taking the
lead. I do not think you yourselves are entirely conscious of the
sublimity of what you are doing and what you are helping to do.
Why, take the $321,000 which, including the expenditure from the
Stone fund, your treasurer reports you have expended during the
past year: at the present rates at which the Government can borrow
money, that represents the income of a capital of $9,000,000—the
income of a capital which, I suppose, is greater than the entire
aggregate of all the productive funds of the American colleges
forty years ago, and which I know is more than fifteen times the
entire productive fund of Harvard College as it was estimated by
President Quincy in 1840. Gen. Eaton made an imperfect estimate of
the amount given for education by voluntary contribution in this
country, and in 1872 it amounted to $8,000,000 and upwards; in
1873, the last year before the great depression in business, it
amounted to more than $11,000,000; and I am informed on credible
and high authority that in this year of grace 1881, it will amount
to more than $18,000,000—the income of a capital, at present rates,
of more than $500,000,000—a vast national school fund invested
not where thieves break through and steal and where moth doth
corrupt, but invested in the patriotism and sense of religious
duty of a Christian people. There is nothing in statesmanship,
there is nothing in the opportunities for political effort, which
the highest honors of the State can hold out to any of her public
servants, which surpasses in dignity the opportunity to help and to
bid God-speed to a work like this.
My friends, it is not strange that the wealth and the conscience
of New England should arouse itself to the opportunities which
God has held out to you in the present age. There are persons
within the sound of my voice within whose lifetime twenty new
states will be admitted to this Union from territory which now is
scarcely settled. That “ancient, primitive and heroical work,” as
Lord Bacon calls it, which he ranks as the highest work which is
vouchsafed to man to take part in, is being performed in your day
and by your hands, if you choose, in a manner unparalleled in human
history; and the sixteen states now reconstructed, within which,
until lately, slavery had bolted the door against every form of
popular education, now, thank God, have their doors unfolded and
afford a field of scarcely less interest than the other. How can
the manufacturer, how can the merchant of Massachusetts fail to
respond to the appeal of these good men and these good women for
help in the great work of educating these communities? Combined,
they are very soon to be the majority, both in states and in
population, they are to determine every question of peace and war,
every policy of finance or of tariff; they are to enact, they are
to furnish the men who expound and the men who execute the laws
under which you and I and our children are to live, and upon which
depends the value of all property and the prosperity of all labor.
Will the manufacturer or the merchant, who gladly taxes himself
to insure his property against fire or against crime, hesitate a
moment when you ask him to insure it against being governed by laws
which are to be made by and rest upon ignorance?
But there is a better reason even than this. I think the
opportunity to take part in such a great benefaction is enough
to stimulate every ingenuous soul. I think there is no more
beautiful memorial among men than to have your name remembered or
your picture hang on the walls of an institution of learning as
one of its founders or benefactors. What gratitude is there like
that which men feel for the college or the founder of the college
where they were bred and educated? Now you have an opportunity to
attach to you the coming generations of the South by this tie, a
tie which will be far stronger than all the hatreds or the passions
engendered by civil war, or which have grown up under years of
misunderstanding and hatred.
I have been gratified in what I have heard and read of the speeches
of this Annual Meeting, and what I have read in the reports of
your Association, in seeing what theory it is upon which all your
efforts seem to rest. The foundation of this American Missionary
Association’s work seems to me to be—if I were to state it in a
single phrase—_reverence for the individual soul_; that doctrine
which Christ preached, for which Christ died—the doctrine
without which there can be neither education, freedom, republic
or self-government in the world—that every human soul, whether
contained in a casket of ivory or a casket of bronze, is a precious
thing in the sight of God, entitled to its equal right, to its
equal opportunity, to its equal share in government with every
other.
Now, my friends, you have got a great deal still to do to teach the
people of this commonwealth of Massachusetts to believe and act
upon that doctrine, whether they profess it or not. We avowed it,
and pledged our lives and fortunes and sacred honor to support it
on the fourth of July, 1776, and under it we grew up from a weak
to a strong and mighty people. The doctrine crossed the water.
When Mr. Webster, in his speech in 1843, at the completion of the
Bunker Hill monument, undertook to sum up what it was that America
had done for mankind in the seventy years, nearly, that had then
elapsed, he mentioned a few inventions and a few new plants and
new animals which had been contributed by this continent, and then
he said that the one thing which we had done for the world was
the avowal and illustration of this doctrine, that however poor
or however humble a man might be, or whatever was his occupation,
he was the equal in rights, the equal in dignity, the equal in
capacity for improvement, in the presumption of the law, to every
other man. Well, Europe began to adopt the doctrine. France
established a republic; England becomes nothing but a republic,
“hooped,” as somebody has said of her. In Spain, Italy and Germany,
the doctrine is spreading; and lo and behold, 75,000 Chinamen
landed on our shores and the great republic has struck its flag!
Men are not free and equal any longer! God has not made of one
blood all the nations of the earth any more!
My friends, there is nothing in this world, if there is any lesson
of history to be depended upon, which God visits with a surer and
a severer punishment than the violation of this law. Just think
how we have undertaken to violate it in the case of the negro;
and think of the terrible retribution in desolated homes, in debt
and squandered treasure, and in the loss of precious human life,
He exacted of us. Just think of our dealing with the Indians! Why,
excluding the five civilized nations in this country, there are
about 170,000 Indians, all told, including those in the states and
including those on the plains. There are 34,000 Indian children,
according to the estimate of the Indian Bureau, which I think is
a little underestimated—certainly not more than 40,000 Indian
children of school age in this country. I suppose Gen. Armstrong
could tell you he could take the whole of them and educate them
at one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars apiece. Why, that
number of Indians is less than one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth part
of the population of this country to-day. If you should gather
them all into a city they would not form a city the tenth in
population among the cities of America; they would not make two
average Congressional districts out of our 293. And yet, in the
mode in which this country has dealt with them, considering that
good faith, honor, honesty, respect for property, respect for
its own word, was out of place, from the time when Washington
said that was our policy, almost in the words I have uttered,
down to the time when the Ponca Indians were driven from their
homes, and half Boston rushed to make itself an accomplice to the
crime, our history has been marked by a disregard of this law,
and has been marked by the terrible retribution which God has
exacted of us. The Indian wars and the cost of supporting the
Indians, of transportation and of military police, are estimated
by a very thorough and careful estimate which I received from the
statistician in the Treasury department the other day, at between
five hundred and six hundred millions of dollars. I think it
amounts to a thousand millions. The interest on the interest of
what we have paid for Indian wars would take every Indian child of
school age and give him a competent education.
Now, my friends, we have gained one thing in the history of our
treatment of the Indian, and we have gained one thing in the
history of our treatment of the negro. It has been demonstrated by
a sufficient number of individual instances that both these races,
having their own peculiarities and their own defects, as the white
man has his own peculiarities and his own defects, are fit for
civilization, for law, for education, for the family, for the home,
for the arts and the industries which belong to civilization and
peace. Take the case of the negro, whom we have not all learned to
respect as we should. I sat in the House of Representatives with
seven members of the negro race, and you could not find seven men
in that House, chosen on any principle of selection, who were the
equals of those seven men, or who certainly were their superiors,
in everything that indicated the conduct of an honorable, sensible
and capable representative of the people. I should like to have
you take the Congressional Record, and read the speeches of the
old slave-masters, and then put by their side the speeches of
the slaves! Why, the great orator and statesman of the Southern
Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, when he came back to the public
service, announced weeks beforehand a speech that he proposed
to make upon a political question of the day. The House and the
country were in expectation. Mr. Stephens gave months of his best
thought and his best care to the preparation of that speech; and
when he finished delivering it, a full-blooded negro got up, and,
on the moment, answered the argument which had been made by the
great champion of the slave-holding race and overthrew it. When our
illustrious senator died, his eulogy was pronounced throughout the
land from the lips of orator and poet and friend. Massachusetts
called to her service, perhaps, the two most brilliant and
accomplished orators in the country, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Schurz;
and still the one eulogy of Charles Sumner which more than any
other deserves to go down into literature and to be found in the
school-books of coming generations, is that pronounced by Robert B.
Elliot, of South Carolina. It is too late. If you do not educate
these black people, it is not because they are your inferiors;
it is because, in your selfishness and greed, you prefer to do
something else with your money than to expend it for the benefit of
these American citizens.
But, my friends, as I have said, I did not come here to enter
upon an argument in behalf of a cause in which this audience,
at least, is already enlisted. I come to express to you nothing
but gratitude, nothing but hope. It is no time for despair. I
notice that our friends, especially the clergymen who spoke to
us, reexamined, somewhat, the foundations of our religious faith
in their speeches, as if they thought that science or unbelief
had shaken a little the strength of the old faith in the minds of
men. I don’t believe it. Undoubtedly, modern science has stripped
our religious faith of some of the frame-work, of some of the
imagery, of some of the associations with which the vision and
the imagination of our early childhood had surrounded it; but it
seems to me that, judging as we should judge of the progress of
mankind, by the state and depth of its religious faith, and by the
perfectness of its obedience to the moral law, humanity reached its
high-water mark on the day of President Garfield’s funeral. Three
thousand millions of mankind, at the same hour, in this country
and across the sea, bowed their heads in a common grief and rose
up to do a common honor to the simple qualities of love, courage,
religious faith, obedience to the will of God, exhibited by one man
and by one woman whom freedom had called to her high places.
Why, my friends, you know how it is. Every speaker and every
auditor knows how an emotion is multiplied by the size of the
audience that feels it. You utter a jest to your neighbor which
will hardly create a smile, or you make a remark with pathos in
it, which will hardly move him; but say the same thing to a great
audience of three or four thousand people, and in every man’s heart
that feeling is multiplied and intensified by the knowledge that
the same feeling is experienced by every other person. You all know
how that is. Now, science, the telegraph and the press enabled the
emotion of human sorrow, at the time of Garfield’s funeral, to be
felt over the entire civilized world. Do you think, speaking of
science having injured the cause of religion or Christianity, that
the telegraph and the printing-press are the products of cold, hard
science—that there is no religion or morality in them? Yet, of what
evil passion would they have rendered the service of conveying it
to the whole of mankind at once? Could any base man, could any mere
intellectual power, could any man of wealth, could any Napoleon,
could any conqueror, have swayed mankind as this simple President
of ours and his wife did on that day? The power in this universe
that makes for evil, and the power in this universe that makes for
righteousness, measured their forces. A poor, feeble fiend shot off
his feeble bolt; a single human life was stricken down; and, lo, a
throb of Divine love thrills a planet!
But, my friends, those of us, young or old, who are enlisted in the
service of God’s moral law, who pour out their wealth or do their
work in life in obedience to the doctrine, “He that hath done it
unto the least of one of these, hath done it unto Me,” works in the
service of the Master, who never will be shaken on His throne, and
whose rewards are sure.
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