Part 13

I love you because you hold the torch of liberty in your outstretched hand. I love you because your constitution speaks of the people as the rulers. (I am a man--I salute you, brother!) I love you because you are not governed by a king. I love you because princes and nobles are not met on your streets-- The dignity of man is not lowered. I love you because of the true red mixture of human blood that flows in your veins. Blessed are the dreams of the first settlers! I love you because, in the beginning of your history, You gathered together your people; You girded your loins; You armed yourself with weapons of steel; And you fought. You fought for liberty; You fought for independence; O divine freemanship! You fought for democracy; You fought for nature’s own laws; And you won. Blessed are the noble men in whom the dreams of our fathers still live! And since those days, the peoples came from the ends of the earth, And you increased; And your stars now count forty and eight. I love you because of what you did in the middle of the nineteenth century,-- You liberated some millions of dark-colored people living among you; You emancipated them. I love you because you gave your blood for the Cubans. You fought for them, but took no soil. You made them free. The Filipinos will be free also. I love [you] because you are a nation of givers. Above all else, I love you because of your Soul, The infinite vistas opening out from your Soul. Blessed be that Soul!

And since I love you, Since my life is entwined with your life, My ideals with your ideals,-- Gray matter and red blood have sealed the pledge,-- I wish you to guard the beacon fires lit on your mountains, I wish you to grow, And increase in the strength of body, In the strength of Soul, The things unseen, Your birthrights, O America!

III

America, my country! Brothers all! What is that Liberty of which you sing? Which impelled the first settlers to seek your soil? For which they offered up their blood? Which you sent abroad in your calls of love? Which brought the nations of the earth to you? Singing, singing, singing! Which you have stamped upon your documents and silver coins? The sunlight spread out over the States?-- What is that Liberty? You say it is your life-principle. Yes: it is your life-principle; The igniting spark that keeps your fires, O America! That feeds your Soul, your Spirit, your Being: As your Liberty is, so is your Soul; As your Soul is, so is your Liberty.

You are not merely dwellers on this continent; You are no longer a province; No longer in the leading strings of a parent land. Not now! You are a new land,-- New, because of a new era started; New, because you are not a land of just one race, But a company of races, Held together by a secret bond, By a _sacred_ bond, Sacred as a consecrated altar, The link between you and your destiny,-- Your very Soul, your Spirit, your Being. Are you conscious of that? Do you feel it as you feel the pulsing of your heart? Do you feel it strike the tablet of your mind as a conviction? Do you feel it quiver through your body when the word “American” is uttered? What then is Liberty? What does the uplifted torch mean? The wreath about her brow? What is this Soul I am speaking about?

Brother, ask yourself that question. Ask yourself at night in the hour of rest. And in the morning when a new day dawns. Ask yourself now! For it is the time of a new consecration. To-day! To-day! Ask yourself a thousand times, For America’s To-morrow depends upon your answer! Yea, the world’s To-morrow depends upon your answer!

IV

I know a man who years ago Departed from his native land, With treasures, wife and child; And settled in the kingdom of the sea. Rich he was, and, in due time, the king made him a lord. He was born in America, and had breathed her Principle of life, yet never known her Soul; Was born in America, yet had not been American.

I know a woman of leisure who lived in Paris; Ten happy, fleeting years she had spent there; Then she returned to the land of her birth-- For a visit. She made the visit shorter than she had intended; She thought of the arts she had left behind; She thought of the boulevards and lighted cafes; She thought of the Countess de C. and her _cercle_ of friends; Our streets and cities she no longer liked; Our people seemed bourgeois to her; Our life was too busy, and fulsome of noise; She longed for leisure and fashion; She scorned our ways. She, too, had not known the Soul of our land, Though born under the Stars and Stripes. My brothers, there are many of these.

VII

My brother, what is Liberty? What is Democracy? I feel a quiver run Through our nation-- What is it we have left undone In faith and consecration?

Our faith of old-- Has it grown cold? Is it the search for gold That made us turn from pledges of the past, Forgetful of the things that last? To play? To chase the shadows in the sun? To count the trifles won? My brother, What is it we have left undone? What is it we must do? How can we see things through, In this New Age?

There is the flesh of body, in which the life of man is rooted; There is the light of the soul, which makes that life a child of God. There is the flesh of body, in which the life of a people is rooted; There is the light of her soul, which makes that life a nation.

What is our nation’s Soul? America’s Light? Her entity as a nation among nations? Her Being, I mean, her Heart, the glow Of her Spirit whereby she grows; Her mind whereby she knows Herself; her Entity Among the nations, free Or bound;--this Soul, do you know?

My brother, I tell you no new truth, Though a deep and wondrous truth. You may have forgotten--forgotten it! You, who have been here too long-- My brother, know it again, again! Or you, newcomer, no one may have told you-- Hear me, then! It is a faith,-- A faith on which hangs all the law and the singer’s prophecy; Which cuts down to the life-roots of our Being; Which lays bare the red-flowing blood,--the sap of life; And the white-shining Light,--the blossoms of life; Which makes us stand before our grave, and face to face with God. Blessed are the men of the past who saw the Light, who had the faith! It is a faith,-- The faith that through our democracy, A government and a people sprung from American soil, Many peoples, peoples sprung from the races of the world-- Through this democracy-- The high-held promises that sleep in man, Infinite stretches of powers potential, Social, intellectual, moral, In embryo traced in lines of beauty, Can into vital life be quickened, Strike deep their roots, Fed in this wondrous soil, And gather mighty powers of growth, Unfolding wing on wing of nascent life, Nearing the stature of ideal selfhood God has destined they should be, Through this democracy, Through a democracy of many peoples, The great American Experiment, The new hope-anointed start, A nation in which the people are the rulers, A free people of peoples free, Living in concord one with another, Striving steadfast for a high humanity, Reaching out to the ends of the world, Making an end of Race for the sake of Man, A humanity, great because it is a race of races, Great because pledged to advance the statehood of man, Crowned with the crown of freedom, Won with eyes and ears, and swords and plows, And creative brother-will, And love for noble deeds, and noble song, and noble art, Calling all men “brothers.”-- That is America’s Soul! Her Soul in the making.

WE MUST BE TRUE

We must be true, with faith renew Our solemn vows, forever true! True as the very prairie grass, The woods and fields and soil and mass Of rock, which sun and air have wrought,-- Growing without a thought, Truly American!

True to historic days, the flow And national ebb of times ago! True to the very drops of life, The battles fought, the stress and strife Of anguished years to make man free,-- Loving our Liberty, Truly American!

True to the Lincoln man, the love-chart Of a great impassioned human heart! True to the very cry of our Soul For better days, the far-out goal Of struggling man,--knowing no race, Lighted by a brother’s face, Truly American!

We must be true, with faith renew Our solemn vows, forever true! True to the very stars above, To truth, to freedom, justice, love For right; yea, unfaltering,--with the brave, Ready for a freeman’s grave, Truly American!

FOOTNOTE:

[11] Copyright, 1917, by The Four Seas Company. By permission of the publishers.

ANGELO PATRI

The country which gave Dante and Garibaldi and Mazzini and Madame Montessori to the world saw the birth, in 1877, of Angelo Patri, teacher in the public schools of New York City and author of “A Schoolmaster of the Great City.” This book recounts his endeavors to realize his educational ideals. That he has been triumphantly successful does not seem to be entirely to the credit of contemporary pedagogical methods, and his arraignment of much current educational theory and practice is as severe as his passionate, Christ-like love of childhood is touching and beautiful. The World War has convinced educators rather generally of the need of vitalizing the work of the schools through contact with life itself, and for this none pleads more eloquently than he.

The following selections under altered titles are taken from chapters one, seven and eight.

AN IMMIGRANT AND HIS FATHER

I remember sitting with the family and the neighbors’ families about the fireplace, while father, night after night, told us stories of the Knights of the Crusades or recounted the glories of the heroes of proud Italy.

How he could tell a story! His voice was strong and soft and soothing, and he had just sufficient power of exaggeration to increase the attractiveness of the tale. We could see the soldiers he told us about pass before us in all their struggles and sorrows and triumphs. Back and forth he marched them into Asia Minor, across Sicily, and into the castles of France, Germany and England. We listened eagerly and came back each night ready to be thrilled and inspired again by the spirit of the good and the great.

Then came the journey over the sea, and the family with the neighbors’ families were part of the life of New York. We were Little Italy.

I was eleven before I went to a city school. All the English I knew had been learned in the street. I knew Italian. From the time I was seven I had written letters for the neighbors. Especially the women folk took me off to a corner and asked me to write letters to their friends in Italy. As they told me the story, I wrote it down. I thus learned the beat of plain folks’ hearts.

My uncle from whom I had learned Italian went back to Italy, and I was left without a teacher; so one day I attached myself to a playmate and went to school,--an “American” school. I gave my name and my age, and was told to sit in a long row of benches with some sixty other children. The teacher stood at the blackboard and wrote “March 5, 1887.” We all read it after her, chanting the singsong with the teacher. Each morning we did the same thing; that is, repeated lessons after the teacher. That first day and the second day were alike, and so were the years that followed. “If one yard of goods cost three cents, how much will twenty-five yards cost?” If one yard costs three cents, then twenty-five yards will cost twenty-five times three cents, or seventy-five cents. The explanation could not vary, or it might not be true or logical.

But there was one thing that was impressed more strongly than this routine. I had always been a sickly, thin, pale-faced child. I did not like to sit still. I wanted to play, to talk, to move about. But if I did any of these things, I was kept after school as a punishment. This would not do. I had to get out of the room, and frequently I endured agonies because the teacher would not permit me to leave the room whenever I wanted to. Many times I went home sick and lay abed.

Soon I discovered that the boys who sat quietly, looked straight ahead and folded their arms behind their backs, and even refused to talk to their neighbors, were allowed the special privilege of leaving the room for one minute, not longer. So I sat still, very still, for hours and hours, so that I might have the one minute. Throughout my whole school life this picture remains uppermost. I sat still, repeated words, and then obtained my minute allowance.

For ten years I did this, and because I learned words I was able to go from the first year of school through the last year of college. My illness and the school discipline had helped after all. They had made my school life shorter by several years than it otherwise might have been.

The colony life of the city’s immigrants is an attempt to continue the village traditions of the mother country. In our neighborhood there were hundreds of families that had come from the same part of Italy. On summer nights they gathered in groups on the sidewalks, the stoops, the courtyards, and talked and sang and dreamed. In winter the men and boys built Roman arches out of the snow.

But gradually the families grew in size. The neighborhood became congested. A few families moved away. Ours was one of them. We began to be a part of the new mass instead of the old. The city with its tremendous machinery, its many demands, its constant calling, calling, began to take hold. What had been intimate, quaint, beautiful, ceased to appeal.

I went to school, father went to work, mother looked after the house. When evening came, instead of sitting about the fire, talking and reliving the day, we sat, each in his own corner. One nursed his tired bones, another prepared his lessons for the morrow. The demands of the school devoured me; the work world exhausted my father. The long evenings of close contact with my home people were becoming rare. I was slipping away from my home; home was slipping away from me.

Yet my father knew what he was about. While the fathers of most of the boys about me were putting their money into business or into their houses, mine put his strength, his love, his money, his comforts into making me better than himself. The spirit of the crusaders should live again in his son. He wanted me to become a priest: I wanted to become a doctor.

During all the years that he worked for me, I worked for myself. While his hopes were centred in the family, mine were extending beyond it. I worked late into the nights, living a life of which my father was not a part. This living by myself tended to make me forget, indeed to undervalue, the worth of my people. I was ashamed sometimes because my folk did not look or talk like Americans.

When most depressed by the feeling of living crudely and poorly, I would go out to see my father at work. I would see him high up on a scaffold a hundred feet in the air, and my head would get dizzy and my heart would rise to my throat. Then I would think of him once more as the poet story-teller with the strong, soothing voice and the far-off visioned eye, and would see why on two-dollar-a-day wages he sent me to college.

Proud of his strength, I would strengthen my moral fibre and respond to his dream. Yet not as he dreamed; for when he fell fifty feet down a ladder and was ill for a whole year, I went to work at teaching.

AN IMMIGRANT AND THE CHILDREN

The schools will change for the better when their life is made basically different from what it has been.

They are pointed in the direction of the fundamentals of knowledge, but working with the tools of the classicists. They have developed and developed until we find life on one side,--that is, outside the school,--and learning on the other side,--that is, inside the school. Now the schools must be pointed so that life and the school become one.

To begin with, better school conditions must be provided for the youngest children. The first steps in child teaching must be sound. The primary years of school must be worth while. Unless the basic structure is real, soul satisfying, higher education will be halting and futile. The child is entitled to a fine start in his life’s journey if he is to have a fair chance of carrying his head high and his shoulders straight.

He comes to school a distinct personality. He is joyous, spontaneous, natural, free. But from the first day, instead of watching, encouraging that personality, the school begins to suppress it and keeps up the process year in and year out. By and by we begin to search for the individuality that has been submerged. We make tempting offers to the student in the high school and in the college--we give him better teachers, better equipment, greater freedom, more leisure, smaller classes, direct experiences. We call upon him to stand out, to face the problems of life honestly, squarely,--to be himself. How blind we are! First we kill, and then we weep for that which we have slain.

We do not look upon the children as an important economic factor. Children are a problem to the parent and teacher, but not to the race.

Do you raise pigs? The government is almost tearful in its solicitude for their health and welfare. The Agricultural Bureau sends you scientific data gathered at great pains and expense. But do you raise children? Ah! They are very expensive. And there are so many of them! One teacher to fifty is the best we can do for you. Teachers who are specialists in their profession? Oh, now really! You know we could never afford that. We must pay for high-priced teachers for the high schools and upper grades, but for the little children--all you want is a pleasant personality that is able to teach the rudiments of learning. There’s not much to do in those grades--just the rudiments, you know. There’s no disciplining to do there, the children are so easily suppressed. It’s only in the upper grades we have the trouble!

Stupid and topsy-turvy!

We need the scientist, the child specialist, the artist, in the first year of school. We need few children to a teacher and plenty of space to move about in.

It’s there the teacher should eagerly, anxiously, reverently, watch for the little spark of genius, of soul, of individuality, and so breathe the breath of life upon it that it can never again be crushed or repressed.

We must spend more money on elementary education if the money we now spend on higher education is to bring forth results that are commensurate with our national needs. We spend fifty dollars a year on the education of a child and ten times that amount on the education of a young college man....

Do we really believe in children? Can we say with the Roman mother, “These are my jewels”? How long ago is it that the state legislature passed a bill enabling the canneries to employ children and women twelve hours a day? Fifty children to a teacher, adulterated foods, military discipline, are not beliefs in children. Enslaving mothers is not a belief in children.

Our belief in children, like our belief in many other good things, is mainly a word belief. What we need is a practical belief. We are still at the stage where we separate work and thought, action and theory, practice and ethics. If we would be saved, we must follow the child’s way of life. His way is the direct way. He learns from contact with the forces about him. He feels them, he sees them, he knows what they do to him. He thinks and does and discovers all in one continuous flow of energy.

The child says: “I am of things as they are. I am the fighter for the things that ought to be. I was the beginning of human progress, and I am the progress of the world. I drive the world on. I invent, I achieve, I reform. About me is always the glory of mounting. I have no fear of falling, of slipping down, down. I have no fear of being lost. I am truth. I am reality, and always I question chaos.”

When the child begins to question the wisdom of the group, its religion, its literature, its dress, its tastes, its method of government, its standard of judgment, that moment the group should begin to take heed. It should take the child’s questioning seriously. When the group fails to do this, it gives up its existence, it ceases to grow because it looks back, it worships tradition, it makes history in terms of the past rather than in terms of the future.

Belief in evolution is a belief in the child.

What the race needs is a principle of growth, spiritual growth, that can never be denied. Such a principle it will find in the child, because the spirit of the child is the one factor of the group existence that in itself keeps changing, growing. The child is nature’s newest experiment in her search for a better type, and the race will be strong as it determines that the experiment shall be successful.

We develop national characteristics in accord with our adherence to a common ideal. We must therefore surrender ourselves for the common good, and the common good to which we should surrender is epitomized in the child idea.

I feel that the attitude towards the school and the child is the ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is not political, economical, religious, but educational, the child our national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is to be remade.

What an ideal for the American people!

When my father came to America, he thought of America only as a temporary home. He learned little or no English. As the years went by he would say, “It is enough; my children know English.” Then more years rolled by. One day he came to me and asked me to help him get his citizenship papers. He and I began reading history together. Month after month we worked, laboring, translating, questioning, until the very day of his examination.

That day I hurried home from college to find a smiling, happy father. “Did you get them?” I asked.

“Yes, and the judge wanted to know how I knew the answers so well, and I told him my son who goes to college taught me, and the judge complimented me.”

I have been a part of many movements to Americanize the foreigner, but I see that the child is the only one who can carry the message of democracy if the message is to be carried at all. If the child fails to make the connection between the ideals of the school and the fundamental beliefs of the people, there is none other to do it. The children are the chain that must bind people together.

I have told about parents growing because they sought growth for their children. I saw them grow through the initiative of the school. These were tenement dwellers. Would this thing hold where the parents are well to do, and the streets are clean and music is of the best, and home ideals are of the highest and the social life of the neighborhood is intimate? Is it still necessary for the school to gather the parents about itself? Is it still necessary for the school to go out into the community and get the parents to consciously work as a group for the children’s interest, to consciously shape their philosophy of life in conformity with the dynamic philosophy that childhood represents?

More necessary! If not to save the children, it should be done to save the parents.