Part 11

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.