Chapter 135

"The mistake which Europeans often make in considering questions of negro improvement and the future of Africa is in supposing that the negro is the European in embryo, in the undeveloped stage, and that when, by-and-by, he shall enjoy the advantages of civilization and culture, he will become like the European; in other words, that the negro is on the same line of progress, in the same groove, with the European, but infinitely in the rear . . . . This view proceeds upon the assumption that the two races are called to the same work, and are alike in potentiality and ultimate development, the negro only needing the element of time, under certain circumstances, to become European. But to our mind it is not a question between the two races of inferiority or superiority. There is no absolute or essential superiority on the one side, or absolute or essential inferiority on the other side. It is a question of difference of endowment and difference of destiny. No amount of training or culture will make the negro a European. On the other hand, no lack of training or deficiency of culture will make the European a negro. The two races are not moving in the same groove, with an immeasurable distance between them, but on parallel lines. They will never meet in the plane of their activities so as to coincide in capacity or performance. They are not identical, as some think, but unequal; they are distinct, but equal--an idea that is in no way incompatible with the Scripture truth that God hath made of one blood all nations of men."

The writer goes on, in a strain that is not mere fancy, but that involves one of the truths of inequality, to say that each race is endowed with peculiar talents; that the negro has aptitudes and capacities which the world needs, and will lack until he is normally trained. In the grand symphony of the universe, "there are several sounds not yet brought out, and the feeblest of all is that hitherto produced by the negro; but he alone can furnish it."--"When the African shall come forward with his peculiar gifts, they will fill a place never before occupied." In short, the African must be civilized in the line of his capacities. "The present practice of the friends of Africa is to frame laws according to their own notions for the government and improvement of this people, whereas God has already enacted the laws for the government of their affairs, which laws should be carefully ascertained, interpreted, and applied; for until they are found out and conformed to, all labor will be ineffective and resultless."

We have thus passed in review some of the tendencies of the age. We have only touched the edges of a vast subject, and shall be quite satisfied if we have suggested thought in the direction indicated. But in this limited view of our complex human problem it is time to ask if we have not pushed the dogma of equality far enough. Is it not time to look the facts squarely in the face, and conform to them in our efforts for social and political amelioration?

Inequality appears to be the divine order; it always has existed; undoubtedly it will continue; all our theories and 'a priori' speculations will not change the nature of things. Even inequality of condition is the basis of progress, the incentive to exertion. Fortunately, if today we could make every man white, every woman as like man as nature permits, give to every human being the same opportunity of education, and divide equally among all the accumulated wealth of the world, tomorrow differences, unequal possession, and differentiation would begin again. We are attempting the regeneration of society with a misleading phrase; we are wasting our time with a theory that does not fit the facts.

There is an equality, but it is not of outward show; it is independent of condition; it does not destroy property, nor ignore the difference of sex, nor obliterate race traits. It is the equality of men before God, of men before the law; it is the equal honor of all honorable labor. No more pernicious notion ever obtained lodgment in society than the common one that to "rise in the world" is necessarily to change the "condition." Let there be content with condition; discontent with individual ignorance and imperfection. "We want," says Emerson, "not a farmer, but a man on a farm." What a mischievous idea is that which has grown, even in the United States, that manual labor is discreditable! There is surely some defect in the theory of equality in our society which makes domestic service to be shunned as if it were a disgrace.

It must be observed, further, that the dogma of equality is not satisfied by the usual admission that one is in favor of an equality of rights and opportunities, but is against the sweeping application of the theory made by the socialists and communists. The obvious reply is that equal rights and a fair chance are not possible without equality of condition, and that property and the whole artificial constitution of society necessitate inequality of condition. The damage from the current exaggeration of equality is that the attempt to realize the dogma in fact--and the attempt is everywhere on foot--can lead only to mischief and disappointment.

It would be considered a humorous suggestion to advocate inequality as a theory or as a working dogma. Let us recognize it, however, as a fact, and shape the efforts for the improvement of the race in accordance with it, encouraging it in some directions, restraining it from injustice in others. Working by this recognition, we shall save the race from many failures and bitter disappointments, and spare the world the spectacle of republics ending in despotism and experiments in government ending in anarchy.

WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME?

By Charles Dudley Warner

Delivered before the Alumni of Hamilton College, Clinton, N. Y., Wednesday, June 26, 1872

Twenty-one years ago in this house I heard a voice calling me to ascend the platform, and there to stand and deliver. The voice was the voice of President North; the language was an excellent imitation of that used by Cicero and Julius Caesar. I remember the flattering invitation--it is the classic tag that clings to the graduate long after he has forgotten the gender of the nouns that end in 'um--orator proximus', the grateful voice said, 'ascendat, videlicet,' and so forth. To be proclaimed an orator, and an ascending orator, in such a sonorous tongue, in the face of a world waiting for orators, stirred one's blood like the herald's trumpet when the lists are thrown open. Alas! for most of us, who crowded so eagerly into the arena, it was the last appearance as orators on any stage.

The facility of the world for swallowing up orators, and company after company of educated young men, has been remarked. But it is almost incredible to me now that the class of 1851, with its classic sympathies and its many revolutionary ideas, disappeared in the flood of the world so soon and so silently, causing scarcely a ripple in the smoothly flowing stream. I suppose the phenomenon has been repeated for twenty years. Do the young gentlemen at Hamilton, I wonder, still carry on their ordinary conversation in the Latin tongue, and their familiar vacation correspondence in the language of Aristophanes? I hope so. I hope they are more proficient in such exercises than the young gentlemen of twenty years ago were, for I have still great faith in a culture that is so far from any sordid aspirations as to approach the ideal; although the young graduate is not long in learning that there is an indifference in the public mind with regard to the first aorist that amounts nearly to apathy, and that millions of his fellow-creatures will probably live and die without the consolations of the second aorist. It is a melancholy fact that, after a thousand years of missionary effort, the vast majority of civilized men do not know that gerunds are found only in the singular number.

I confess that this failure of the annual graduating class to make its expected impression on the world has its pathetic side. Youth is credulous--as it always ought to be--and full of hope--else the world were dead already--and the graduate steps out into life with an ingenuous self-confidence in his resources. It is to him an event, this turning-point in the career of what he feels to be an important and immortal being. His entrance is public and with some dignity of display. For a day the world stops to see it; the newspapers spread abroad a report of it, and the modest scholar feels that the eyes of mankind are fixed on him in expectation and desire. Though modest, he is not insensible to the responsibility of his position. He has only packed away in his mind the wisdom of the ages, and he does not intend to be stingy about communicating it to the world which is awaiting his graduation. Fresh from the communion with great thoughts in great literatures, he is in haste to give mankind the benefit of them, and lead it on into new enthusiasm and new conquests.

The world, however, is not very much excited. The birth of a child is in itself marvelous, but it is so common. Over and over again, for hundreds of years, these young gentlemen have been coming forward with their specimens of learning, tied up in neat little parcels, all ready to administer, and warranted to be of the purest materials. The world is not unkind, it is not even indifferent, but it must be confessed that it does not act any longer as if it expected to be enlightened. It is generally so busy that it does not even ask the young gentlemen what they can do, but leaves them standing with their little parcels, wondering when the person will pass by who requires one of them, and when there will happen a little opening in the procession into which they can fall. They expected that way would be made for them with shouts of welcome, but they find themselves before long struggling to get even a standing-place in the crowd--it is only kings, and the nobility, and those fortunates who dwell in the tropics, where bread grows on trees and clothing is unnecessary, who have reserved seats in this world.

To the majority of men I fancy that literature is very much the same that history is; and history is presented as a museum of antiquities and curiosities, classified, arranged, and labeled. One may walk through it as he does through the Hotel de Cluny; he feels that he ought to be interested in it, but it is very tiresome. Learning is regarded in like manner as an accumulation of literature, gathered into great storehouses called libraries--the thought of which excites great respect in most minds, but is ineffably tedious. Year after year and age after age it accumulates--this evidence and monument of intellectual activity--piling itself up in vast collections, which it needs a lifetime even to catalogue, and through which the uncultured walk as the idle do through the British Museum, with no very strong indignation against Omar who burned the library at Alexandria.

To the popular mind this vast accumulation of learning in libraries, or in brains that do not visibly apply it, is much the same thing. The business of the scholar appears to be this sort of accumulation; and the young student, who comes to the world with a little portion of this treasure dug out of some classic tomb or mediaeval museum, is received with little more enthusiasm than is the miraculous handkerchief of St. Veronica by the crowd of Protestants to whom it is exhibited on Holy Week in St. Peter's. The historian must make his museum live again; the scholar must vivify his learning with a present purpose.

It is unnecessary for me to say that all this is only from the unsympathetic and worldly side. I should think myself a criminal if I said anything to chill the enthusiasm of the young scholar, or to dash with any skepticism his longing and his hope. He has chosen the highest. His beautiful faith and his aspiration are the light of life. Without his fresh enthusiasm and his gallant devotion to learning, to art, to culture, the world would be dreary enough. Through him comes the ever-springing inspiration in affairs. Baffled at every turn and driven defeated from a hundred fields, he carries victory in himself. He belongs to a great and immortal army. Let him not be discouraged at his apparent little influence, even though every sally of every young life may seem like a forlorn hope. No man can see the whole of the battle. It must needs be that regiment after regiment, trained, accomplished, gay, and high with hope, shall be sent into the field, marching on, into the smoke, into the fire, and be swept away. The battle swallows them, one after the other, and the foe is yet unyielding, and the ever-remorseless trumpet calls for more and more. But not in vain, for some day, and every day, along the line, there is a cry, "They fly! they fly!" and the whole army advances, and the flag is planted on an ancient fortress where it never waved before. And, even if you never see this, better than inglorious camp-following is it to go in with the wasting regiment; to carry the colors up the slope of the enemy's works, though the next moment you fall and find a grave at the foot of the glacis.

What are the relations of culture to common life, of the scholar to the day-laborer? What is the value of this vast accumulation of higher learning, what is its point of contact with the mass of humanity, that toils and eats and sleeps and reproduces itself and dies, generation after generation, in an unvarying round, on an unvarying level? We have had discussed lately the relation of culture to religion. Mr. Froude, with a singular, reactionary ingenuity, has sought to prove that the progress of the century, so-called, with all its material alleviations, has done little in regard to a happy life, to the pleasure of existence, for the average individual Englishman. Into neither of these inquiries do I purpose to enter; but we may not unprofitably turn our attention to a subject closely connected with both of them.

It has not escaped your attention that there are indications everywhere of what may be called a ground-swell. There is not simply an inquiry as to the value of classic culture, a certain jealousy of the schools where it is obtained, a rough popular contempt for the graces of learning, a failure to see any connection between the first aorist and the rolling of steel rails, but there is arising an angry protest against the conditions of a life which make one free of the serene heights of thought and give him range of all intellectual countries, and keep another at the spade and the loom, year after year, that he may earn food for the day and lodging for the night. In our day the demand here hinted at has taken more definite form and determinate aim, and goes on, visible to all men, to unsettle society and change social and political relations. The great movement of labor, extravagant and preposterous as are some of its demands, demagogic as are most of its leaders, fantastic as are many of its theories, is nevertheless real, and gigantic, and full of a certain primeval force, and with a certain justice in it that never sleeps in human affairs, but moves on, blindly often and destructively often, a movement cruel at once and credulous, deceived and betrayed, and revenging itself on friends and foes alike. Its strength is in the fact that it is natural and human; it might have been predicted from a mere knowledge of human nature, which is always restless in any relations it is possible to establish, which is always like the sea, seeking a level, and never so discontented as when anything like a level is approximated.

What is the relation of the scholar to the present phase of this movement? What is the relation of culture to it? By scholar I mean the man who has had the advantages of such an institution as this. By culture I mean that fine product of opportunity and scholarship which is to mere knowledge what manners are to the gentleman. The world has a growing belief in the profit of knowledge, of information, but it has a suspicion of culture. There is a lingering notion in matters religious that something is lost by refinement--at least, that there is danger that the plain, blunt, essential truths will be lost in aesthetic graces. The laborer is getting to consent that his son shall go to school, and learn how to build an undershot wheel or to assay metals; but why plant in his mind those principles of taste which will make him as sensitive to beauty as to pain, why open to him those realms of imagination with the illimitable horizons, the contours and colors of which can but fill him with indefinite longing?

It is not necessary for me in this presence to dwell upon the value of culture. I wish rather to have you notice the gulf that exists between what the majority want to know and that fine fruit of knowledge concerning which there is so widespread an infidelity. Will culture aid a minister in a "protracted meeting"? Will the ability to read Chaucer assist a shop-keeper? Will the politician add to the "sweetness and light" of his lovely career if he can read the "Battle of the Frogs and the Mice" in the original? What has the farmer to do with the "Rose Garden of Saadi"?

I suppose it is not altogether the fault of the majority that the true relation of culture to common life is so misunderstood. The scholar is largely responsible for it; he is largely responsible for the isolation of his position, and the want of sympathy it begets. No man can influence his fellows with any power who retires into his own selfishness, and gives himself to a self-culture which has no further object. What is he that he should absorb the sweets of the universe, that he should hold all the claims of humanity second to the perfecting of himself? This effort to save his own soul was common to Goethe and Francis of Assisi; under different manifestations it was the same regard for self. And where it is an intellectual and not a spiritual greediness, I suppose it is what an old writer calls "laying up treasures in hell."

It is not an unreasonable demand of the majority that the few who have the advantages of the training of college and university should exhibit the breadth and sweetness of a generous culture, and should shed everywhere that light which ennobles common things, and without which life is like one of the old landscapes in which the artist forgot to put sunlight. One of the reasons why the college-bred man does not meet this reasonable expectation is that his training, too often, has not been thorough and conscientious, it has not been of himself; he has acquired, but he is not educated. Another is that, if he is educated, he is not impressed with the intimacy of his relation to that which is below him as well as that which is above him, and his culture is out of sympathy with the great mass that needs it, and must have it, or it will remain a blind force in the world, the lever of demagogues who preach social anarchy and misname it progress. There is no culture so high, no taste so fastidious, no grace of learning so delicate, no refinement of art so exquisite, that it cannot at this hour find full play for itself in the broadest fields of humanity; since it is all needed to soften the attritions of common life, and guide to nobler aspirations the strong materialistic influences of our restless society.

One reason, as I said, for the gulf between the majority and the select few to be educated is, that the college does not seldom disappoint the reasonable expectation concerning it. The graduate of the carpenter's shop knows how to use his tools--or used to in days before superficial training in trades became the rule. Does the college graduate know how to use his tools? Or has he to set about fitting himself for some employment, and gaining that culture, that training of himself, that utilization of his information which will make him necessary in the world? There has been a great deal of discussion whether a boy should be trained in the classics or mathematics or sciences or modern languages. I feel like saying "yes" to all the various propositions. For Heaven's sake train him in something, so that he can handle himself, and have free and confident use of his powers. There isn't a more helpless creature in the universe than a scholar with a vast amount of information over which he has no control. He is like a man with a load of hay so badly put upon his cart that it all slides off before he can get to market. The influence of a man on the world is generally proportioned to his ability to do something. When Abraham Lincoln was running for the Legislature the first time, on the platform of the improvement of the navigation of the Sangamon River, he went to secure the votes of thirty men who were cradling a wheat field. They asked no questions about internal improvements, but only seemed curious whether Abraham had muscle enough to represent them in the Legislature. The obliging man took up a cradle and led the gang round the field. The whole thirty voted for him.

What is scholarship? The learned Hindu can repeat I do not know how many thousands of lines from the Vedas, and perhaps backwards as well as forwards. I heard of an excellent old lady who had counted how many times the letter A occurs in the Holy Scriptures. The Chinese students who aspire to honors spend years in verbally memorizing the classics --Confucius and Mencius--and receive degrees and public advancement upon ability to transcribe from memory without the error of a point, or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder that China is today more like an herbarium than anything else. Learning is a kind of fetish, and it has no influence whatever upon the great inert mass of Chinese humanity.

I suppose it is possible for a young gentleman to be able to read--just think of it, after ten years of grammar and lexicon, not to know Greek literature and have flexible command of all its richness and beauty, but to read it!--it is possible, I suppose, for the graduate of college to be able to read all the Greek authors, and yet to have gone, in regard to his own culture, very little deeper than a surface reading of them; to know very little of that perfect architecture and what it expressed; nor of that marvelous sculpture and the conditions of its immortal beauty; nor of that artistic development which made the Acropolis to bud and bloom under the blue sky like the final flower of a perfect nature; nor of that philosophy, that politics, that society, nor of the life of that polished, crafty, joyous race, the springs of it and the far-reaching, still unexpended effects of it.

Yet as surely as that nothing perishes, that the Providence of God is not a patchwork of uncontinued efforts, but a plan and a progress, as surely as the Pilgrim embarkation at Delfshaven has a relation to the battle of Gettysburg, and to the civil rights bill giving the colored man permission to ride in a public conveyance and to be buried in a public cemetery, so surely has the Parthenon some connection with your new State capitol at Albany, and the daily life of the vine-dresser of the Peloponnesus some lesson for the American day-laborer. The scholar is said to be the torch-bearer, transmitting the increasing light from generation to generation, so that the feet of all, the humblest and the loveliest, may walk in the radiance and not stumble. But he very often carries a dark lantern.