Read Ebook: Speeches Addresses and Occasional Sermons Volume 2 (of 3) by Parker Theodore

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It is plain that business, the press, and politics all tend to promote a great activity of body and mind. In business, the love of gain, the enterprising spirit of our practical men in all departments, their industry, thrift and forecast, stimulate men to great exertions, and produce a consequent development of the faculties called out. Social distinction depends almost wholly on wealth; that never is accumulated by mere manual industry, such is the present constitution of society, but it is acquired by the higher forms of industry, in which the powers of nature serve the man, or he avails himself of the creations of mere manual toil. Hence there is a constant pressure towards the higher modes of industry for the sake of money; of course, a constant effort to be qualified for them. So in the industrial departments the mind is more active than the hand. Accordingly it has come to pass that most of the brute labor of the free states is done by cattle, or by the forces of nature--wind, water, fire--which we have harnessed by our machinery, and set to work. In New England most of the remaining work which requires little intelligence is done by Irishmen, who are getting a better culture by that very work. Men see the industrial handiwork of the North, and wonder; they do not always see the industrial head-work, which precedes, directs and causes it all; they seldom see the complex forces of which this enterprise and progress are the resultant.

There is no danger that we shall be sluggards. Business now takes the same place in the education of the people that was once held by war: it stimulates activity, promotes the intercourse of man with man, nation with nation; assembling men in masses, it elevates their temperature, so to say; it leads to new and better forms of organization; it excites men to invention, so that thereby we are continually acquiring new power over the elements, peacefully annexing to our domain new provinces of nature--water, wind, fire, lightning--setting them to do our work, multiplying the comforts of life, and setting free a great amount of human time. It is not at all destructive; not merely conservative, but continually creates anew. Its creative agent is not brute force, but educated mind. A man's trade is always his teacher, and industry keeps a college for mankind, much of our instruction coming through our hands; with us, where the plough is commonly in the hands of him who owns the land it furrows, business affords a better education than in most other countries, and develops higher qualities of mind. There is a marked difference in this respect between the North and South. There was never before such industry, such intense activity of head and hand in any nation in a time of peace.

The press encourages the same activity, enterprise, perseverance. Both of these encourage generosity; neither honors the miser, who gets for the sake of getting, or "starves, cheats, and pilfers to enrich an heir;" he does not die respectably in Boston, who dies rich and bequeaths nothing to any noble public charity. It encourages industry which accumulates with the usual honesty, and for a rather generous use.

The press furnishes us with books exceedingly cheap. We manufacture literature cheaper than any nation except the Chinese. Even the best books, the works of the great masters of thought, are within the reach of an industrious farmer or mechanic, if half a dozen families combine for that purpose. The educational power of a few good books scattered through a community, is well known.

Then the press circulates, cheap and wide, its newspapers, emphatically the literature of men who read nothing else: they convey intelligence from all parts of the world, and broaden the minds of home-keeping youths, who need not now have homely wits.

The state, also, promotes activity, enterprise, hardihood, perseverance and thrift. The American Government is eminently distinguished by these five qualities. The form of government stimulates patriotism, each man has a share in the public lot. The theocracies, monarchies, and aristocracies of old time have produced good and great examples of patriotism, in the few or the many; but the nobler forms of love of country, of self-denial and disinterested zeal for its sake, are left for a democracy to bring to light.

Here all men are voters, and all great questions are, apparently and in theory, left to the decision of the whole people. This popular form of government is a great instrument in developing and instructing the mind of the nation. It helps extend and intensify the intelligent activity which is excited by business and the press. Such is the nature of our political institutions that, in the free states, we have produced the greatest degree of national unity of action, with the smallest restriction of personal freedom, have reconciled national unity with individual variety, not seeking uniformity; thus room is left for as much individualism as a man chooses to take; a vast power of talent, enterprise and invention is left free for its own work. Elsewhere, save in England, this is latent, kept down by government. Since this power is educated and has nothing to hold it back; since so much brute work is done by cattle and the forces of nature, now domesticated and put in harness, and much time is left free for thought, more intelligence is demanded, more activity, and the citizens of the free states have become the most active, enterprising and industrious people in the world; the most inventive in material work.

In all these three forms of action there is much to stir men to love of distinction. The career is open to talent, to industry; open to every man; the career of letters, business, and politics. Our rich men were poor men; our famous men came of sires else not heard of. The laurel, the dollar, the office, and the consequent social distinction of men successful in letters, business and politics, these excite the obscure or needy youth to great exertions, and he cannot sleep; emulation wakes him early, and keeps him late astir. Behind him, scattering "the rear of darkness," stalk poverty and famine, gaunt and ugly forms, with scorpion whip to urge the tardier, idler man. The intense ambition for money, for political power, and the social results they bring, keeps men on the alert. So ambition rises early, and works with diligence that never tires.

The Church, embracing all the churches under that name, cultivates the memory of men, and teaches reverence for the past; it helps keep activity from wandering into unpopular forms of wickedness or of unbelief. Men who have the average intelligence, goodness and piety, it keeps from slipping back, thus blocking to rearward the wheels of society, so that the ascent gained shall not be lost; men who have less than this average it urges forward, addressing them in the name of God, encouraging by hope of heaven, and driving with fear of hell. It turns the thought of the people towards God; it sets before us some facts in the life, and some parts of the doctrine, of the noblest One who ever wore the form of man, bidding us worship him. The ecclesiastical worship of Jesus of Nazareth is, perhaps, the best thing in the American church. It has the Sunday and the institution of preaching under its control. A body of disciplined men are its servants; they praise the ordinary virtues; oppose and condemn the unpopular forms of error and of sin. Petty vice, the vice of low men, in low places, is sure of their lash. They promote patriotism in its common form. Indirectly, they excite social and industrial rivalry, and favor the love of money by the honor they bestow upon the rich and successful. But at the same time they temper it a little, sometimes telling men, as business or the state does not, that there is in man a conscience, affection for his brother-man, and a soul which cannot live by bread alone; no, not by wealth, office, fame and social rank. They tell us, also, of eternity, where worldly distinctions, except of orthodox and heterodox, are forgotten, where wealth is of no avail; they bid us remember God.

Such are the good things of these great national forces; the good things which in this fourfold way we are teaching ourselves. The nation is a monitorial school, wonderfully contrived for the education of the people. I do not mean to say that it is by the forethought of men that the American democracy is at the same time a great practical school for the education of the human race. This result formed no part of our plan, and is not provided for by the Constitution of the United States; it comes of the forethought of God, and is provided for in the Constitution of the Universe.

Now each of these educational forces has certain defects, negative evils, and certain vices, positive evils, which tend to misdirect the nation, and so hinder the general education of the people: of these, also, let me speak in detail.

The state appeals to force, not to justice; this is its last appeal; the force of muscles aided by force of mind, instructed by modern science in the art to kill. The nation appeals to force in the settlement of affairs out of its borders. We have lately seen an example of this, when we commenced war against a feeble nation, who, in that special emergency, had right on her side, about as emphatically as the force was on our side. The immediate success of the enterprise, the popular distinction acquired by some of the leaders, the high honor bestowed on one of its heroes, all this makes the lesson of injustice attractive. It may be that a similar experiment will again be tried, and doubtless with like success. Certainly there is no nation this side of the water which can withstand the enterprise, the activity, the invention, industry and perseverance of a people so united, and yet so free and intelligent. Another successful injustice of this character, on a large scale, will make right still less regarded, and might honored yet more.

The force we employ out of our borders, might opposed to right, we employ also at home against our brethren, and keep three millions of them in bondage; we watch for opportunities to extend the institution of slavery over soil unpolluted by that triple curse, and convert the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, into an instrument for the defence of slavery.

The men we honor politically, by choosing them to offices in the state, are commonly men of extraordinary force, sometimes, it is true, only of extraordinary luck, but of only ordinary justice; men who, perhaps, have mind in the heroic degree, but conscience of the most vulgar pattern. They are to keep the law of the United States when it is wholly hostile to the law of the universe, to the everlasting justice of God.

I am not speaking to politicians, professional representatives of the state; not speaking for political effect; not of the state as a political machine for the government of the people. I am speaking to teachers, for an educational purpose; of the state as an educational machine, as one of the great forces for the spiritual development of the people. Now by this preference of force and postponement of justice at home and abroad, in the selection of men for office, with its wealth, and rank, and honor, by keeping the law of the land to the violation of the law of God, it is plain we are teaching ourselves to love wrong; at least to be insensible to the right. What we practise on a national scale as a people, it is not easy to think wrong when practised on a personal scale, by this man and that.

The patriotism, also, which the state nurses, is little more than that Old Testament patriotism which loves your countryman, and hates the stranger; the affection which the Old Testament attributes to Jehovah, and which makes him say, "I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau;" a patriotism which supports our country in the wrong as readily as in the right, and is glad to keep one sixth part of the nation in bondage without hope. It is not a patriotism which, beginning here, loves all the children of God, but one that robs the Mexican, enslaves the African, and exterminates the Indian.

These are among the greater evils taught us by the political action of the people as a whole. If you look at the action of the chief political parties, you see no more respect for justice in the politics of either party, than in the politics of the nation, the resultant of both; no more respect for right abroad, or at home. One party aims distinctively at preserving the property already acquired; its chief concern is for that, its sympathy there; where its treasure is, is also its heart. It legislates, consciously or otherwise, more for accumulated wealth, than for the laboring man who now accumulates. This party goes for the dollar; the other for the majority, and aims at the greatest good of the greatest number, leaving the good of the smaller number to most uncertain mercies. Neither party seems to aim at justice, which protects both the wealth that labor has piled up, and the laborer who now creates it; justice, which is the point of morals common to man and God, where the interests of all men, abroad and at home, electing and elected, greatest number and smallest number, exactly balance. Falsehood, fraud, a willingness to deceive, a desire for the power and distinction of office, a readiness to use base means in obtaining office--these vices are sown with a pretty even hand upon both parties, and spring up with such blossoms and such a fruitage as we all see. The third political party has not been long enough in existence to develop any distinctive vices of its own.

I shall not speak of the public or private character of the politicians who direct the state; no doubt that is a powerful element in our national education; but as a class, they seem no better and no worse than merchants, mechanics, ministers and farmers, as a class; so in their influence there is nothing peculiar, only their personal character ceases to be private, and becomes a public force in the education of the people.

The Churches have the same faults as the State. There is the same postponement of justice and preference of force, the same neglect of the law of God in their zeal for the statutes of men; the same crouching to dollars or to numbers. However, in the churches these faults appear negatively, rather than as an affirmation. The worldliness of the church is not open, self-conscious and avowed; it is not, as a general thing, that human injustice is openly defended, but rather justice goes by default. But if the churches do not positively support and teach injustice, as the state certainly does, they do not teach the opposite, and, so far as that goes, are allies of the state in its evil influence. The fact that the churches, as such, did not oppose the war, and do not oppose slavery, its continuance, or its extension; nay, that they are often found its apologists and defenders, seldom its opponents; that they not only pervert the sacred books of the Christians to its defence, but wrest the doctrines of Christianity to justify it; the fact that they cannot, certainly do not, correct the particularism of the political parties, the love of wealth in one, of mere majorities in the other; that they know no patriotism not bounded by their country, none coextensive with mankind; that they cannot resist the vice of party spirit--these are real proofs that the church is but the ally of the state in this evil influence.

But the church has also certain specific faults of its own. It teaches injustice by continually referring to the might of God, not His justice; to His ability and will to damn mankind, not asking if He has the right? It teaches that in virtue of His infinite power, He is not amenable to infinite justice, and to infinite love. Thus, while the state teaches, in the name of expediency and by practice, that the strong may properly be the tyrants of the weak, the mighty nation over the feeble, the strong race over the inferior, that the government may dispense with right at home and abroad--the church, as theory in Christ's name, teaches that God may repudiate His own justice and His own love.

The churches have little love of truth, as such, only of its uses. It must be such a truth as they can use for their purposes; canonized truth; truth long known; that alone is acceptable and called "religious truth;" all else is "profane and carnal," as the reason which discovers it. They represent the average intelligence of society; hence, while keeping the old, they welcome not the new. They promote only popular forms of truth, popular in all Christendom, or in their special sect. They lead in no intellectual reforms; they hinder the leaders. Negatively and positively, they teach, that to believe what is clerically told you in the name of religion, is better than free, impartial search after the truth. They dishonor free thinking, and venerate constrained believing. When the clergy doubt, they seldom give men audience of their doubt. Few scientific men not clerical believe the Bible account of creation,--the universe made in six days, and but a few thousand years ago,--or that of the formation of woman, and of the deluge. Some clerical men still believe these venerable traditions, spite of the science of the times; but the clerical men who have no faith in these stories not only leave the people to think them true and miraculously taught, but encourage men in the belief, and calumniate the men of science who look the universe fairly in the face and report the facts as they find them.

The church represents only the popular morality, not any high and aboriginal virtue. It represents not the conscience of human nature, reflecting the universal and unchangeable moral laws of God, touched and beautified by his love, but only the conscience of human history, reflecting the circumstances man has passed by, and the institutions he has built along the stream of time. So, while it denounces unpopular sins, vices below the average vice of society, it denounces also unpopular excellence, which is above the average virtue of society. It blocks the wheels rearward, and the car of humanity does not roll down hill; but it blocks them forward also. No great moral movement of the age is at all dependent directly on the church for its birth; very little for its development. It is in spite of the church that reforms go forward; it holds the curb to check more than the rein to guide. In morals, as in science, the church is on the anti-liberal side, afraid of progress, against movement, loving "yet a little sleep, a little slumber;" conservative and chilling, like ice, not creative, nor even quickening, as water. It doffs to use and wont; has small confidence in human nature, much in a few facts of human history. It aims to separate Piety from Goodness, her natural and heaven-appointed spouse, and marry her to Bigotry, in joyless and unprofitable wedlock. The church does not lead men to the deep springs of human nature, fed ever from the far heights of the Divine nature, whence flows that river of God, full of living water, where weary souls may drink perennial supply. While it keeps us from falling back, it does little directly to advance mankind. In common with the state, this priest and Levite pass by on the other side of the least developed classes of society, leaving the slave, the pauper, and the criminal, to their fate, hastening to strike hands with the thriving or the rich.

These faults are shared in the main by all sects; some have them in the common, and some in a more eminent degree, but none is so distinguished from the rest as to need emphatic rebuke, or to deserve a special exemption from the charge. Such are the faults of the church of every land, and must be from the nature of the institution; like the state, it can only represent the average of mankind.

I am not speaking to clergymen, professional representatives of the church, not of the church as an ecclesiastical machine for keeping and extending certain opinions and symbols; not for an ecclesiastical purpose; I speak to teachers, for an educational purpose, of the church as an educational machine, one of the great forces for the spiritual development of the people.

The Business of the land has also certain vices of its own; while it promotes the virtues I have named before, it does not tend to promote the highest form of character. It does not promote justice and humanity, as one could wish; it does not lead the employer to help the operative as a man, only to use him as a tool, merely for industrial purposes. The average merchant cares little whether his ship brings cloth and cotton, or opium and rum. The average capitalist does not wish the stock of his manufacturing company divided into small shares, so that the operatives can invest their savings therein and have a portion of the large dividends of the rich; nor does he care whether he takes a mortgage on a ship or a negro slave, nor whether his houses are rented for sober dwellings, or for drunkeries; whether the state hires his money to build harbors at home, or destroy them abroad. The ordinary manufacturer is as ready to make cannons and cannon-balls to serve in a war which he knows is unjust, as to cast his iron into mill-wheels, or forge it into anchors. The common farmer does not care whether his barley feeds poultry for the table, or, made into beer, breeds drunkards for the almshouse and the jail; asks not whether his rye and potatoes become the bread of life, or, distilled into whiskey, are deadly poison to men and women. He cares little if the man he hires become more manly or not; he only asks him to be a good tool. Whips for the backs of negro slaves are made, it is said, in Connecticut with as little compunction as Bibles are printed there; "made to order," for the same purpose--for the dollar. The majority of blacksmiths would as soon forge fetter-chains to enslave the innocent limbs of a brother-man, as draught-chains for oxen. Christian mechanics and pious young women, who would not hurt the hair of an innocent head, have I seen at Springfield, making swords to slaughter the innocent citizens of Vera Cruz and Jalapa. The ships of respectable men carry rum to intoxicate the savages of Africa, powder and balls to shoot them with; they carry opium to the Chinese; nay, Christian slaves from Richmond and Baltimore to New Orleans and Galveston. In all commercial countries, the average vice of the age is mixed up with the industry of the age, and unconsciously men learn the wickedness long intrenched in practical life. It is thought industrial operations are not amenable to the moral law, only to the law of trade. "Let the supply follow the demand" is the maxim. A man who makes as practical a use of the golden rule as of his yard-stick, is still an exception in all departments of business.

Even in the commercial and manufacturing parts of America, money accumulates in large masses; now in the hands of an individual, now of a corporation. This money becomes an irresponsible power, acting by the laws, but yet above them. It is wielded by a few men, to whom it gives a high social position and consequent political power. They use this triple form of influence, pecuniary, social and political, in the spirit of commerce, not of humanity, not for the interest of mankind; thus the spirit of trade comes into the state. Hence it is not thought wrong in politics to buy a man, more than in commerce to buy a ship; hence the rights of a man, or a nation, are looked on as articles of trade, to be sold, bartered, and pledged; and in the Senate of the United States, we have heard a mass of men, more numerous than all our citizens seventy years ago, estimated as worth twelve hundred millions of dollars.

In most countries business comes more closely into contact with men than the state, or the church, or the press, and is a more potent educator. Here it not only does this, but controls the other three forces, which are mainly instruments of this; hence this form of evil is more dangerous than elsewhere, for there is no power organized to resist it as in England or Rome; so it subtly penetrates everywhere, bidding you place the accidents before the substance of manhood, and value money more than man.

Notwithstanding the good qualities of the Press, the books it multiplies, and the great service it renders, it also has certain vices of its own. From the nature of the thing the greater part of literature represents only the public opinion of the time. It must therefore teach deference to that, not deference to truth and justice. It is only the eminent literature which can do more than this; books, which at first fall into few hands though fit, and like the acorns sown with the mulleins and the clover, destined to germinate but slowly, long to be over-topped by an ephemeral crop, at last, after half an hundred years, shall mature their own fruit for other generations of men. The current literature of this age only popularizes the thought of the eminent literature of the past. Great good certainly comes from this, but also great evil.

Of all literature, the newspapers come most into contact with men--they are the literature of the people, read by such as read nothing else; read also by such as read all things beside. Taken in the mass, they contain little to elevate men above the present standard. The political journals have the general vice of our politics, and the special faults of the particular party; the theological journals have the common failings of the church, intensified by the bigotry of the sects they belong to; the commercial journals represent the bad qualities of business. Put all three together, and it is not their aim to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, nor to promote justice, the whole of justice, and nothing but justice. The popular literature helps bring to consciousness the sentiments and ideas which prevail in the state, the church, and business. It brings those sentiments and ideas intimately into connection with men, magnetizing them with the good and ill of those three powers, but it does little directly to promote a higher form of human character.

So, notwithstanding the good influence of these four modes of national activity in educating the grown men of America, they yet do not afford the highest teaching which the people require, to realize individually the idea of a man, and jointly that of a democracy. The state does not teach perfect justice; the church does not teach that, or love of truth. Business does not teach perfect morality, and the average literature, which falls into the hands of the million, teaches men to respect public opinion more than the word of God, which transcends that. Thus these four teach only the excellence already organized or incorporated in the laws, the theology, the customs, and the books of the land. I cannot but think these four teachers are less deficient here than in other lands, and have excellences of their own, but the faults mentioned are inseparable from such institutions. An institution is an organized thought; of course, no institution can represent a truth which is too new or too high for the existing organizations, yet that is the truth which it is desirable to teach. So there will always be exceptional men, with more justice, truth and love than is represented by the institutions of the time, who seem therefore hostile to these institutions, which they seek to improve and not destroy. Contemporary with the priests of Judah and Israel were the prophets thereof, antithetic to one another as the centripetal and centrifugal forces, but, like them, both necessary to the rhythmic movement of the orbs in heaven, and the even poise of the world.

In Rome and in England the idea of a theocracy and an aristocracy has become a fact in the institutions of the land, which accordingly favor the formation of priests and gentlemen. The teachers of the educated class, therefore, may trust to the machinery already established to do their work, only keeping off the spirit of the age which would make innovations; and such is the respectability and popular esteem of the institutions, that this is done easier than men think, by putting an exceptional book in the index at Rome or in the academical fire at Oxford. But here, the idea of a democracy is by no means so well established and organized in institutions. It is new, and while a theocrat and an aristocrat are respected everywhere, a democrat is held in suspicion; accordingly, to make men, the teacher cannot trust his educational machinery, he must make it, and invent anew as well as turn his mill.

These things being so, it is plain the teachers in the schools should be of such a character that they can give the children what they will most want when they become men; such an intellectual and moral development that they can appreciate and receive the good influence of these four educational forces, and withstand, resist, and exterminate the evil thereof. In the schools of a democracy which are to educate the people and make them men, you need more aboriginal virtue than in the schools of an aristocracy or a theocracy, where a few are to be educated as gentlemen or priests. Since the institutions of the land do not represent the idea of a democracy, and the average spirit of the people, which makes the institutions, represents it no more, if the children of the people are to become better than their fathers, it is plain their teachers must be prophets, and not priests merely; must animate them with a spirit higher, purer and more holy than that which inspires the state, the church, business, or the common literature of the times. As the teacher cannot impart and teach what he does not possess and know, it is also plain that the teacher must have this superior spirit.

To accomplish the public education of the children of the people, we need the three classes of institutions just mentioned: free Common Schools, free High Schools and free Colleges. Let me say a word of each.

The design of the Common School is to take children at the proper age from their mothers, and give them the most indispensable development, intellectual, moral, affectional and religious; to furnish them with as much positive, useful knowledge as they can master, and, at the same time, teach them the three great scholastic helps or tools of education--the art to read, to write and calculate.

The children of most parents are easily brought to school, by a little diligence on the part of the teachers and school committee; but there are also children of low and abandoned, or, at least, neglected parents, who live in a state of continual truancy; they are found on the banks of your canals; they swarm in your large cities. When those children become men, through lack of previous development, instruction and familiarity with these three instruments of education, they cannot receive the full educational influence of the state and church, of business and the press: they lost their youthful education, and therefore they lose, in consequence, their manly culture. They remain dwarfs, and are barbarians in the midst of society; there will be exceptional men whom nothing can make vulgar; but this will be the lot of the mass. They cannot perform the intelligent labor which business demands, only the brute work, so they lose the development which comes through the hand that is active in the higher modes of industry, which, after all, is the greatest educational force; accordingly, they cannot compete with ordinary men, and remain poor; lacking also that self-respect which comes of being respected, they fall into beggary, into intemperance, into crime; so, from being idlers at first, a stumbling-block in the way of society, they become paupers, a positive burden which society must take on its shoulders; or they turn into criminals, active foes to the industry, the order, and the virtue of society.

Now if a man abandons the body of his child, the state adopts that body for a time; takes the guardianship thereof, for the child's own sake; sees that it is housed, fed, clad, and cared for. If a man abandons his child's spirit, and the child commits a crime, the state, for its own sake, assumes the temporary guardianship thereof, and puts him in a jail. When a man deserts his child, taking no concern about his education, I venture to make the suggestion, whether it would not be well, as a last resort, for the State to assume the guardianship of the child for its own sake, and for the child's sake. We allow no one, with ever so thick a skin, to grow up in nakedness; why should we suffer a child, with however so perverse a parent, to grow up in ignorance and degenerate into crime? Certainly, a naked man is not so dangerous to society as an ignorant man, nor is the spectacle so revolting. I should have less hope of a state where the majority were so perverse as to continue ignorant of reading, writing and calculating, than of one where they were so thick-skinned as to wear no clothes. In Massachusetts, there is an Asylum for juvenile offenders, established by the city of Boston, a Farm School for bad boys, established by the characteristic benevolence of the rich men of that place, and a State Reform School under the charge of the Commonwealth: all these are for lads who break the laws of the land. Would it not be better to take one step more, adopt them before they offended, and allow no child to grow up in the barbarism of ignorance? Has any man an unalienable right to live a savage in the midst of civilization?

We need also public High Schools, to take children where the common schools leave them, and carry them further on. Some States have done something towards establishing such institutions; they are common in New England. Some have established Normal Schools, special High Schools for the particular and professional education of public teachers. Without these, it is plain there would not be a supply of competent educators for the public service.

Then we need free Colleges, conducted by public officers, and paid for by the public purse. Without these the scheme is not perfect. The idea which lies at the basis of the public education of a people in a democracy, is this: Every man, on condition of doing his duty, has a right to the means of education, as much as a right, on the same condition, to the means of defence from a public enemy in time of war, or from starvation in time of plenty and of peace. I say every man, I mean every woman also. The amount of education must depend on the three factors named before,--on the general achievement of mankind, the special ability of the state, and the particular power of the individual.

If all is free, common schools, high schools, and colleges, boys and girls of common ability and common love of learning, will get a common education; those of greater ability, a more extended education, and those of the highest powers, the best culture which the race can now furnish, and the state afford. Hitherto no nation has established a public college, wholly at the public cost, where the children of the poor and the rich could enjoy together the great national charity of superior education. To do this is certainly not consistent with the idea of a theocracy or an aristocracy, but it is indispensable to the complete realization of a democracy. Otherwise the children of the rich will have a monopoly of superior education, which is the case with the girls everywhere--for only the daughters of rich men can get a superior education, even in the United States--and with boys in England and France, and of course the offices, emoluments and honors which depend on a superior education; or else the means thereof will be provided for poor lads by private benefactions, charity-funds and the like, which some pious and noble man has devoted to this work. In this case the institutions will have a sectarian character, be managed by narrow, bigoted men, and the gift of the means of education be coupled with conditions which must diminish its value, and fetter the free spirit of the young man. This takes place in many of the collegiate establishments of the North, which, notwithstanding those defects, have done a great good to mankind.

The Common Schools giving their pupil the power of reading, writing and calculating, developing his faculties and furnishing him with much elementary knowledge, put him in communication with all that is written in a common form, in the English tongue; its treasures lie level to his eye and hand. The High School and the College, teaching him also other languages, afford him access to the treasures contained there; teaching him the mathematics and furnishing him with the discipline of science, they enable him to understand all that has hitherto been recorded in the compendious forms of philosophy, and thus place the child of large ability in connection with all the spiritual treasures of the world. In the mean time, for all these pupils, there is the material and the human world about them, the world of consciousness within. They can study both and add what they may to the treasures of human discovery or invention.

It seems to me that it is the duty of the state to place the means of this education within the reach of all children of superior ability,--a duty that follows from the very idea of a democracy, not to speak of the idea of Christianity. It is not less the interest of the state to do so, for then, youths, well born, with good abilities, will not be hindered from getting a breeding proportionate to their birth, and from occupying the stations which are adequately filled only by men of superior native abilities, enriched by culture, and developed to their highest power. Then the work of such stations will fall to the lot of such men, and of course be done. Eminent ability, talent, or genius, should have eminent education, and so serve the nation in its eminent kind; for when God makes a million-minded man, as once or twice in the ages, or a myriad-minded man, as He does now and then, it is plain that this gift also is to be accounted precious, and used for the advantage of all.

I say no state has ever attempted to establish such institutions; yet the Government of the United States has a seminary for the public education of a few men at the public cost. But it is a school to qualify men to fight; they learn the science of destruction, the art thereof, the kindred art and science of defence. If the same money we now pay for military education at West Point were directed to the education of teachers of the highest class, say professors and presidents of colleges; if the same pains were taken to procure able men, to furnish them with the proper instruction for their special work, and give them the best possible general development of their powers, not forgetting the moral, the affectional and the religious, and animating them with the philanthropic spirit needed for such a work, how much better results would appear! But in the present intellectual condition of the people it would be thought unworthy of a nation to train up school-masters! But is it only soldiers that we need?

All these institutions are but introductory, a preparatory school, in three departments, to fit youths for the great educational establishment of practical life. This will find each youth and maiden as the schools leave him, moulding him to their image, or moulded by him to a better. So it is plain what the teachers are to do:--besides teaching the special branches which fall to their lot, they are to supply for the pupils, the defects of the State, of the Church, of Business, and the Press, especially the moral defects. For this great work of mediating between the mother and the world, for so furnishing and fitting the rising generation, introducing them into practical life, that they shall receive all the good of these public educational forces with none of the ill, but enhance the one while they withstand the other, and so each in himself realize the idea of man, and all in their social capacity, the idea of a democracy--it is also plain what sort of men we need for teachers: we need able men, well endowed by nature, well disciplined by art; we need superior men--men juster than the state, truer and better than the churches, more humane than business, and higher than the common literature of the press. There are always men of that stamp born into the world; enough of them in any age to do its work. How shall we bring them to the task? Give young men and women the opportunity to fit themselves for the work, at free common schools, high schools, normal schools, and colleges; give them a pay corresponding to their services, as in England and Rome; give them social rank and honor in that proportion, and they will come; able men will come; men well disciplined will come; men of talent and even genius for education will come.

In the state you pay a man of great political talents large money and large honors; hence there is no lack of ability in politics, none of competition for office. In the church you pay a good deal for a "smart minister," one who can preach an audience into the pews and not himself out of the pulpit. Talent enough goes to business; educated talent too, at least with a special education for this, honor, and social distinction. Private colleges and theological schools, often, have powerful men for their professors and presidents; sometimes, men of much talent for education; commonly, men of ripe learning and gentlemanly accomplishments. Even men of genius seek a place as teachers in some private college, where they are under the control of the leaders of a sect--and must not doubt its creed, nor set science a-going freely lest it run over some impotent theological dogma--or else of a little coterie, or close corporation of men selected because radical or because conservative, men chosen not on account of any special fitness for superintending the superior education of the people, but because they were one-sided, and leaned this way in Massachusetts and that in Virginia. Able men seek such places because they get a competent pay, competent honors, competent social rank. Senators and ambassadors are not ashamed to be presidents of a college, and submit to the control of a coterie, or a sect, and produce their results. If such men can be had for private establishments to educate a few to work in such trammels and such company, certainly, it is not difficult to get them for the public and for the education of all. As the state has the most children to educate, the most money to pay with, it is clear, not only that they need the best ability for this work, but that they can have it soon as they make the teacher's calling gainful and respectable.

In England and Rome, the most important spiritual function of the state is the production of the gentleman and the priest; in democratic America it is the production of the man. Some nations have taken pains with the military training of all the people, for the sake of the state, and made every man a soldier. No nation has hitherto taken equivalent pains with the general education of all, for the sake of the state and the sake of the citizens;--"the heathens of China" have done more than any Christian people, for the education of all. This was not needed in a theocracy, nor an aristocracy; it is essential to a democracy. This is needed politically; for where all men are voters, the ignorant man, who cannot read the ballot which he casts; the thief, the pirate, and the murderer, may, at any time, turn the scale of an election, and do us a damage which it will take centuries to repair. Ignorant men are the tools of the demagogue; how often he uses them, and for what purposes, we need not go back many years to learn. Let the people be ignorant and suffrage universal, a very few men will control the state, and laugh at the folly of the applauding multitude whose bread they waste, and on whose necks they ride to insolence and miserable fame.

America has nothing to fear from any foreign foe; for nearly forty years she has had no quarrel but of her own making. Such is our enterprise and our strength, that few nations would, carelessly, engage in war with us; none, without great provocation. In the midst of us, is our danger; not in foreign arms, but in the ignorance and the wickedness of our own children, the ignorance of the many, the wickedness of the few who will lead the many to their ruin. The bulwark of America is not the army and navy of the United States, with all the men at public cost instructed in the art of war; it is not the swords and muskets idly bristling in our armories; it is not the cannon and the powder carefully laid by; no, nor is it yet the forts, which frown in all their grim barbarity of stone along the coast, defacing the landscape, else so fair: these might all be destroyed to-night, and the nation be as safe as now. The more effectual bulwark of America is her schools. The cheap spelling-book, or the vane on her school-house is a better symbol of the nation than "The star-spangled banner;" the printing press does more than the cannon; the press is mightier than the sword. The army that is to keep our liberties--you are part of that, the noble army of teachers. It is you, who are to make a great nation greater, even wise and good,--the next generation better than their sires.

Europe shows us, by experiment, that a republic cannot be made by a few well-minded men, however well-meaning. They tried for it at Rome, full of enlightened priests; in Germany, the paradise of the scholar, but there was not a people well educated, and a democracy could not stand upright long enough to be set a-going. In France, where men are better fitted for the experiment than elsewhere in continental Europe, you see what comes of it--the first step is a stumble, and for their president, the raw republicans chose an autocrat, not a democrat; not a mere soldier, but only the name of a soldier; one that thinks it an insult if liberty, equality, and fraternity be but named!

Think you a democracy can stand without the education of all; not barely the smallest pittance thereof which will keep a live soul in a live body, but a large, generous cultivation of mind and conscience, heart and soul? A man, with half an eye, can see how we suffer continually in politics for lack of education among the people. Some nations are priest-ridden, some king-ridden, some ridden of nobles; America is ridden by politicians, a heavy burden for a foolish neck.

Our industrial interests demand the same education. The industrial prosperity of the North, our lands yearly enriching, while they bear their annual crop; our railroads, mills and machines, the harness with which we tackle the elements,--for we domesticate fire and water, yes, the very lightning of heaven--all these are but material results of the intelligence of the people. Our political success and our industrial prosperity, both come from the pains taken with the education of the people. Halve this education, and you take away three fourths of our political welfare, three fourths of our industrial prosperity; double this education, you greaten the political welfare of the people, you increase their industrial success fourfold. Yes, more than that, for the results of education increase by a ratio of much higher powers.

It seems strange that so few of the great men in politics have cared much for the education of the people; only one of those, now prominent before the North, is intimately connected with it. He, at great personal sacrifice of money, of comfort, of health, even of respectability, became superintendent of the common schools of Massachusetts, a place whence we could ill spare him, to take the place of the famous man he succeeds. Few of the prominent scholars of the land interest themselves in the public education of the people. The men of superior culture think the common school beneath their notice; but it is the mother of them all.

None of the States of the North has ever given this matter the attention it demands. When we legislate about public education, this is the question before us:--Shall we give our posterity the greatest blessing that one generation can bestow upon another? Shall we give them a personal power which will create wealth in every form, multiply ships, and roads of earth, or of iron; subdue the forest, till the field, chain the rivers, hold the winds as its vassals, bind with an iron yoke the fire and water, and catch and tame the lightning of God? Shall we give them a personal power which will make them sober, temperate, healthy, and wise; that shall keep them at peace, abroad and at home, organize them so wisely that all shall be united, and yet, each left free, with no tyranny of the few over the many, or the little over the great? Shall we enable them to keep, to improve, to double manifold the political, social, and personal blessings they now possess; shall we give them this power to create riches, to promote order, peace, happiness--all forms of human welfare, or shall we not? That is the question. Give us intelligent men, moral men, men well developed in mind and conscience, heart and soul, men that love man and God, industrial prosperity, social prosperity, and political prosperity, are sure to follow. But without such men, all the machinery of this threefold prosperity is but a bauble in a child's hand, which he will soon break or lose, which he cannot replace when gone, nor use while kept.

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