Chapter 7

It is safe, at least, to make the proposition that public schools are a curse to all the youth whom they unfit for their proper places in the world. It is the favorite theory of teachers that every man can make of himself any thing that he really chooses to make. They resort to this theory to rouse the ambition of their more sluggish pupils, and thus get more study out of them. I have known entire schools instructed to aim at the highest places in society, and the most exalted offices of life. I have known enthusiastic old fools who made it their principal business to go from school to school, and talk such stuff to the pupils as would tend to unfit every one of humble circumstances and slender possibilities for the life that lay before him. The fact is persistently ignored, in many of these schools, established emphatically for the education of the people, that the majority of the places in this world are subordinate and low places. Every boy and girl is taught to "be something" in the world, which would be very well if being "something" were being what God intended they should be; but when being "something" involves the transformation of what God intended should be a respectable shoemaker into a very indifferent and a very slow minister of the Gospel, the harmful and even the ridiculous character of the instruction becomes apparent.

There are two classes of evil results attending the inculcation of these favorite doctrines of the school teachers--first, the unfitting of men and women for humble places; and, second, the impulsion of men of feeble power into high places, for the duties of which they have neither natural nor acquired fitness. There are no longer any American girls who go out to service in families. They went into mills from the chamber and the kitchen, but now they have left the mills, and their places are filled by Scotch and Irish girls. Why is this? Is it because that among the American girls there are none of poverty, and of humble powers? Is it because they are not wanted? Or is it because they have become unfitted for such services as these, and feel above them? Is it not because they have become possessed of notions that would render them uncomfortable in family service, and render any family they might serve uncomfortable? An American servant, who good-naturedly accepts her condition, and knows and loves her place, who is willing to acknowledge that she has a mistress, and who enters into her department of the family life as a harmonious and happy member, may exist, but I do not know her. People have ceased inquiring for American servants. They would like them, generally, because they are intelligent and Protestant, but they cannot get them because they are unwilling to accept service, and the obligations and conditions it imposes. Where all the American girls are, I do not know. I can remember the time when thrifty farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen took wives from the kitchens of gentlemen where they were employed,--good, intelligent, self-respectful women they were, too--who became modest mistresses of thrifty families afterward;--but that is all done with now. Under the present mode of education, nobody is fitted for a low place, and everybody is taught to look for a high one.

If we go into a school exhibition, our ears are deafened by declamation addressed to ambition. The boys have sought out from literature every stirring appeal to effort, and every extravagant promise of reward. The compositions of the girls are of the same general tone. We hear of "infinite yearnings," from the lips of girls who do not know enough to make a pudding, and of being polished "after the similitude of a palace" from those who do not comprehend the commonest duties of life. Every thing is on the high-pressure principle. The boys, all of them, have the general idea that every thing that is necessary to become great men is to try for it; and each one supposes it possible for him to become Governor of the State, or President of the Union. The idea of being educated to fill a humble office in life is hardly thought of, and every bumpkin who has a memory sufficient for the words repeats the stanza:--

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time."

There is a fine ring to this familiar quatrain of Mr. Longfellow, but it is nothing more than a musical cheat. It sounds like truth, but it is a lie. The lives of great men all remind us that they have made their own memory sublime, but they do not assure us at all that we can leave footprints like theirs behind us. If you do not believe it, go to the cemetery yonder. There they lie--ten thousand upturned faces--ten thousand breathless bosoms. There was a time when fire flashed in those vacant orbits, and warm ambitions pulsed in those bosoms. Dreams of fame and power once haunted those hollows skulls. Those little piles of bones that once were feet ran swiftly and determinedly through forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years of life; but where are the prints they left? "He lived--he died--he was buried"--is all that the headstone tells us. We move among the monuments, we see the sculpture, but no voice comes to us to say that the sleepers are remembered for any thing they ever did. Natural affection pays its tribute to its departed object, a generation passes by, the stone grows gray, and the man has ceased to be, and is to the world as if he had never lived. Why is it that no more have left a name behind them? Simply because they were not endowed by their Maker with the power to do it, and because the offices of life are mainly humble, requiring only humble powers for their fulfilment. The cemeteries of one hundred years hence will be like those of to-day. Of all those now in the schools of this country, dreaming of fame, not one in twenty thousand will be heard of then,--not one in twenty thousand will have left a footprint behind him.

Now I believe that a school, in order to be a good one, should be one that will fit men and women, in the best way, for the humble positions that the great mass of them must necessarily occupy in life. It is not necessary that boys and girls be taught any less than they are taught now. They should receive more practical knowledge than they do now, without a doubt, and less of that which is simply ornamental, but they cannot know too much. An intelligent gardener is better than a clod-hopper, and an educated nurse is better than an ignorant one; but if the gardener and the nurse have been spoiled for their business and their condition, by the sentiments which they have imbibed with their knowledge, they are made uncomfortable to themselves, and to those whom they serve. I do not care how much knowledge a man may have acquired in school, that school has been a curse to him if its influence has been to make him unhappy in his place, and to fill him with futile ambitions.

The country has great reason to lament the effect of the kind of instruction upon which I have remarked. The universal greed for office is nothing but an indication of the appetite for distinction which has been diligently fed from childhood. It is astonishing to see the rush for office on the occasion of the change of a State or National Administration. Men will leave quiet and remunerative employments, and subject themselves to mean humiliations, simply to get their names into a newspaper, and to achieve a little official importance and social distinction. This desire for distinction seems to run through the whole social body, as a kind of moral scrofula, developing itself in various ways, according to circumstances and peculiarities of constitution. The consequence is that politics have become the pursuit of small men, and we no longer have an opportunity to put the best men into office. The scramble for place among fools is so great and so successful, that men of dignity and modesty retire from the field in disgust. Everybody wants to "be something," and in order to be something, everybody must leave his proper place in the world, and assume a position which God never intended he should fill. Look in upon a State legislature once, and you will find sufficient illustration of my meaning. Not one man in five of the whole number possesses the first qualification for making the laws of a State, and half of them never read the constitution of the country. I mean no contempt for the good, honest men of whom our State legislatures are principally composed, but I wish simply to say that there is nothing in their quality of mind, habits of thought, intellectual power, or style of pursuits that fits them for the great and momentous functions of legislation. They are there, a set of "nobodies," mainly for the purpose of becoming "somebodies," and not for any object connected with the good of the State.

Somehow, all the students in all our schools get the idea, that a man in order to be "somebody" must be in public life. Now think of the fact that the millions attending school in this country have in some way acquired this idea, and that only one in every one thousand of these is either needed in public life, or can win success there. Let this fact be realized, and it is easy to see that the nine hundred and ninety-nine will feel that they are somehow cheated out of their birthright. They desired to be in public life, and be "somebody," but they are not, and so their life grows tame and tasteless to them. They are disappointed. The men solace themselves with a petty justice's commission, or a town office of some kind, and the women--some of them--talk about "woman's rights," and make themselves notorious and ridiculous at public meetings. I think women have rights which they do not at present enjoy, but I have very little confidence in the motives of their petticoated champions, who court mobs, delight in notoriety, and glory in their opportunity to burst away from private life, and be recognized by the public as "somebodies." I insist on this:--that private and even obscure life is the normal condition of the great multitude of men and women in this world; and that, to serve this private life, public life is instituted. Public life has no legitimate significance save I as it is related to the service of private life. It requires peculiar talents and peculiar education, and brings with it peculiar trials; and the man best fitted for it would be the last man confidently to assert his fitness for it.

Thousands seek to become "somebodies" through the avenues of professional life; and so professional life is full of "nobodies." The pulpit is crowded with goodish "nobodies"--men who have no power--no unction--no mission. They strain their brains to write common-places, and wear themselves out repeating the rant of their sect and the cant of their schools. The bar is cursed with "nobodies" as much as the pulpit. The lawyers are few; the pettifoggers are many. The bar, more than any other medium, is that through which the ambitious youth of the country seek to attain political eminence. Thousands go into the study of law, not so much for the sake of the profession, as for the sake of the advantages it is supposed to give them for political preferment. An ambitious boy who has taken it into his head to be "somebody," always studies law; and as soon as he is "admitted to the bar" he is ready to begin his political scheming. Multitudes of lawyers are a disgrace to their profession, and a curse to their country. They lack the brains necessary to make them respectable, and the morals requisite for good neighborhood. They live on quarrels, and breed them that they may live. They have spoiled themselves for private life, and they spoil the private life around them. As for the medical profession, I tremble to think how many enter it because they have neither piety enough for preaching, nor brains enough to practice law. When I think of the great army of little men that is yearly commissioned to go forth into the world with a case of sharp knives in one hand, and a magazine of drugs in the other, I heave a sigh for the human race. Especially is all this lamentable when we remember that it involves the spoiling of thousands of good farmers and mechanics, to make poor professional men, while those who would make good professional men are obliged to attend to the simple duties of life, and submit to preaching that neither feeds nor stimulates them, and medicine that kills or fails to cure them.

There must be something radically wrong in our educational system, when youth are generally unfitted for the station which they are to occupy, or are forced into professions for which they have no natural fitness. The truth is that the stuff talked to boys and girls alike, about "aiming high," and the assurances given them, indiscriminately, that they can be any thing that they choose to become, are essential nuisances. Our children all go to the public schools. They are all taught these things. They all go out into the world with high notions, and find it impossible to content themselves with their lot. They had hoped to realize in life that which had been promised them in school, but all their dreams have faded, and left them disappointed and unhappy. They envy those whom they have been taught to consider above them, and learn to count their own lives a failure. Girls starve in a mean poverty, or do worse, because they are too proud to work in a chamber, or go into a shop. American servants are obsolete, all common employments are at a discount, the professions are crowded to overflowing, the country throngs with demagogues, and a general discontent with a humble lot prevails, simply because the youth of America have had the idea drilled into them that to be in private life, in whatever condition, is to be, in some sense, a "nobody." It is possible that the schools are not exclusively to blame for this state of things, and that our political harangues, and even our political institutions, have something to do with it.

What we greatly need in this country is the inculcation of soberer views of life. Boys and girls are bred to discontent. Everybody is after a high place, and nearly everybody fails to get one; and, failing, loses heart, temper, and content. The multitude dress beyond their means, and live beyond their necessities, to keep up a show of being what they are not. Farmers' daughters do not love to become farmers' wives, and even their fathers and mothers stimulate their ambition to exchange their station for one which stands higher in the world's estimation. Humble employments are held in contempt, and humble powers are everywhere making high employments contemptible. Our children need to be educated to fill, in Christian humility, the subordinate offices of life which they must fill, and taught to respect humble callings, and to beautify and glorify them by lives of contented and glad industry. When public schools accomplish an end so desirable as this, they will fulfil their mission, and they will not before. I seriously doubt whether one school in a hundred, public or private, comprehends its duty in this particular. They fail to inculcate the idea that the majority of the offices of life are humble, that the powers of the majority of the youth which they contain have relation to those offices, that no man is respectable when he is out of his place, and that half of the unhappiness of the world grows out of the fact, that, from distorted views of life, men are in places where they do not belong. Let us have this thing altogether reformed.

LESSON IX.

PERVERSENESS.

"Because she's constant, he will change. And kindest glances coldly meet, And all the time he seems so strange, His soul is fawning at her feet." COVENTRY PATMORE.

"All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so as to do as little good and plague and disappoint as many people as possible." --HAZLITT.

It seems to me, either that there is a great deal of human nature in a pig, or that there is a great deal of pig in human nature. I find myself always sympathizing with a pig that wishes to go in an opposite direction to that in which its owner would drive it. It would be a sufficient reason for me to desire to go eastward, that a man was behind me, with an oath in his mouth and a very heavy boot on his foot, endeavoring to drive me westward. We are jealous of our freedom. We naturally rise in opposition to a will that undertakes to command our movements. This is not the result of education at all; it is pure human nature. Command a child--who shall be only old enough to understand you--to refrain from some special act, and you excite in his heart a desire to do that act; and he will have, nine times in ten, no reason for his desire to do it but your command that he shall not. The youngest human soul that has a will at all, takes the first occasion to declare its independence.

Now, I believe this principle in human nature to be, in itself, good. It is that which declares a man's right to himself--that which asserts personal liberty in thought, will, and movement. I believe it existed in Adam and Eve, and that it is more than likely that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was despoiled because our beautiful great-grandmother, (for whom I confess much sympathy and affection,) was forbidden to touch it. It is a principle which should always be carefully distinguished from perverseness, in all our dealings with young and old, and in all our estimates of human character. When a child obeys a man, or when one man obeys another, it should always be for good and sufficient reason. Neither child nor man should be expected to surrender his right to himself without the presentation to him of the proper motive. When, yielding to this motive, the soul consents to be directed or led, it becomes obedient. Compulsion may secure conformity, but never obedience. If I, as a child or man, am to yield myself to the direction of any other man, that man is bound to present to me an adequate motive for the surrender. God throws upon me personal responsibility--gives me to myself--and no man, parent or otherwise, can make me truly obedient without giving me the motive for obedience. When a child or a man fails to yield to the legitimate motives of obedience, he is perverse, and it is about perverseness in some of its forms of manifestation that I propose to talk in this article.

At starting, I must give perverseness a somewhat broader meaning than that thus far indicated. I will say that that person is perverse who, from vanity, or pride of opinion and will, or malice, or any mean consideration, refuses to yield his conduct and himself to those motives and influences which his reason and conscience recognize to be pure and good and true. In its least aggravated form, perhaps, we find it among lovers. Women will sometimes persistently ignore a passion which they know has taken full possession of them, and grieve the heart that loves them by a coldness and indifference which they do not feel at all. Rather than acknowledge their affection for one whose loss would kill them, or, what would be the same thing, kill the world for them, they have lied, grown sick, and gone nearly insane. This is a perverseness very uncommon. Sometimes lovers have been very tender and devoted so long as a doubt of ultimate mutual possession remained to give zest to their passion, but the moment this doubt has been removed, one or the other has become incomprehensibly indifferent.

I have noticed that very few married pairs are matches in the matter of warmth and expression of passion between the parties. The man will be all devotion and tenderness--brimming with expressions of affection and exhibitions of fondness, and the woman all coolness and passivity, or (which is much more common) the woman will be active in expression, lavishing caresses and tendernesses upon a man who very possibly grows harder and colder with every delicate proof that the whole wealth of his wife's nature is poured at his feet, as a libation upon an altar. It is here that we see some of the strangest cases of perverseness that it is possible to conceive. I know men who are not bad men--who, I suppose, really love and respect their wives--and who would deny themselves even to heroism to give them the comforts and luxuries of life, yet who find themselves moved to reject with poorly-covered scorn, and almost to resent, the varied expressions of affection to which those wives give utterance. I know wives who long to pour their hearts into the hearts of their husbands, and to get sympathetic and fitting response, but who are never allowed to do it. They live a constrained, suppressed, unsatisfied life. They absolutely pine for the privilege of saying freely what they feel, in all love's varied languages, toward men who love them, but who grow harder with every approach of tenderness and colder with every warm, invading breath. A shower that purifies the atmosphere, and refreshes the face of heaven itself, sours cream, just as love's sweetest expression sours these men.

I have known wives to walk through such an experience as this into a condition of abject slavery--to waste their affection without return, until they have become poor, and spiritless, and mean. I have known them to lose their will--to become the mere dependent mistresses of their husbands--to be creeping cravens in dwellings where it should be their privilege to move as radiant queens. I have known them thrown back upon themselves, until they have become bitter railers against their husbands--uncomfortable companions--openly and shamelessly flouting their affection. I do not know what to make of the perverseness which induces a man to repel the advances of a heart which worships him, and to become hard and tyrannical in the degree by which that heart seeks to express its affection for him. There are husbands who would take the declaration that they do not love their wives as an insult, yet who hold the woman who loves them in fear and restraint through their whole life. I know wives who move about their houses with a trembling regard to the moods and notions of their husbands--wives who have no more liberty than slaves, who never spend a cent of money without a feeling of guilt, and who never give an order about the house without the same doubt of their authority that they would have if they were only housekeepers, employed at a very economical salary. I can think of no proper punishment for such husbands except daily ducking in a horse-pond, until reformation. Yet these asses are so unconscious of their detestable habits of feeling and life, that, probably, not one of them who reads this will think that I mean him, but will wonder where I have lived to fall in with such outlandish people.