An Old Civilization in a New Country. — Old Methods in a New System of Schools. — Sordid Views of Education. — The highest Aim Money-getting. — Herbert Spencer on the English Schools. — Same Defects in the American Schools. — Maxims of Selfishness. — The Cultivation of Avarice. — Political Incongruities. — Negroes escaping from Slavery called Fugitives from Justice. — The Results of Subjective Educational Processes. — Climatic Influences alone saved America from becoming a Slave Empire. — Illiteracy. — Abnormal Growth of Cities. — Failure of Justice. — Defects of Education shown in Reckless and Corrupt Legislation. — Waste of an Empire of Public Land. — Henry D. Lloyd’s History of Congressional Land Grants. — The Growth and Power of Corporations. — The Origin of large Fortunes, Speculations. — Old Social Forces producing old Social Evils. — Still America is the Hope of the World. — The Right of Suffrage in the United States justifies the Sentiment of Patriotism. — Let Suffrage be made Intelligent and Virtuous, and all Social Evils will yield to it; and all the Wealth of the Country is subject to the Draft of the Ballot for Education. — The Hope of Social Reform depends upon a complete Educational Revolution.

The discovery of America startled Europe. It was a great blow to prevailing dogmatisms. It upset many learned (?) theories. It swept away patristic geography. It completed the figure of the earth, rendering it susceptible of intelligent study. The advantages of such investigation accrued to man, to a degree, before the social and civil life of America began. In the century and a quarter which elapsed between the landing of Columbus and that of the Pilgrims, on these shores, considerable social and political progress was made in Europe, and especially in England. From the turbulent scenes of the reigns of James I. and Charles I., which eventuated in the Cromwellian rebellion and victory of the Commons, the Pilgrims escaped. They not only bore with them, to the new continent, the impress of the long struggle for liberty waged by the English people, but they were, in a certain sense, the product of the progress of all the ages. But they constituted only a small part of the column of immigrants. Detachments of the Cavaliers came also, and Germans, Frenchmen, and Irishmen came with them.

The discovery of America was a sort of new creation,[91] but its almost virgin soil was destined to become the home of an old civilization. From all the nationalities of the Old World the New World was to be peopled. The ambitious, the restless, the adventurous, the enterprising, and the hardy of every tongue, were gradually to assemble in the new field of action. The manner in which they treated the natives of the new country, both north and south, showed their origin and their training. Their determination to conquer and hold the new territory was but thinly disguised. Their descent upon the Atlantic coast was not the exact counterpart of that of Cæsar upon the coast of Britain, but it was the same in spirit; and the active trade in slaves which soon sprang up, and which was thereafter vigorously prosecuted for two hundred years, showed the taint of savagery—the impress of Roman cruelty, rapacity, and injustice.

It is evident that in its most important feature—the formation of character—education had made little if any progress at the time of the organization of civil society in America. The democratic idea was not new. It found expression in every form during the struggles of Greece and Rome, and the revival of learning had led to the discussion of governmental questions in the light of history. Besides, the reformation of Luther had opened the way to the last analysis of dissent in the person of Roger Williams, who asserted the right of absolute freedom of thought and speech. Of the religious right of private judgment the political right of an equal voice in public affairs is the corollary. Hence, that the Puritans should establish the town organizations so justly lauded by M. Tocqueville was quite logical.[92] Nor was the public-school system less logical; all citizens being members of the government, all children must be prepared for the duties of citizenship. But unfortunately the old system of education was put into the new schools, as the old civilizations had been transferred to the new country. The system of education under which the kings and ruling classes of England and of the continent of Europe were trained to selfishness, cruelty, and injustice, was heedlessly adopted in the schools of New England, which became the models of schools throughout the country.

The popular idea in regard to the schools was (1) that they fitted their pupils for the duties of citizenship, or, more properly, for the art of governing, and (2) that they taught the art of getting on in the world; and getting on in the world was interpreted to mean getting and keeping money. That this sordid view of education was generally held in the rural districts of New England is shown by the fact that any culture beyond a limited and imperfect knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic was regarded as superfluous. Not even the rudiments of either the sciences or the arts were imparted, and yet it is only through a knowledge of the sciences and the arts that progress in civilization is made. The early settlers of New England devised a new system of schools, but they imported into them an old system of education, the Greco-Roman subjective system, introduced into England with the revival of learning. Of this system Mr. Herbert Spencer says, “Had there been no teaching but such as is given in our public schools, England would now be what it was in feudal times.” And he adds:

“The vital knowledge, that by which we have grown as a nation to what we are, and which now underlies our whole existence, is a knowledge that has got itself taught in nooks and corners, while the ordained agencies for teaching have been mumbling little else but dead formulas.”[93]

But these are merely negative effects of subjective methods of education. The positive evil effect of them is selfishness, the sum of all villanies. Under the new system of schools—schools for all—the old philosophy of life flourished. Under the name of prudence, selfishness was deified. The maxim of Herbert—“Help thyself and God will help thee”—was reproduced by Franklin in a hundred forms. The child was taught, not that “The half is more than the whole,” but that “In the race of life the devil takes the hindmost.”

Thus greed and avarice were cultivated to the sacrifice of honesty. Calling selfishness prudence led to confounding right and wrong—freedom and slavery. Hence we have the Declaration of Independence containing the lofty sentiment, “All men are created equal,” and the Constitution throwing the shield of its protection over human bondage. A false system of education led to political incongruities of the grossest character, as, in the preamble to the Constitution, the declaration of its high purpose—to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty—and in the body of the instrument a guaranty of the slave-trade for twenty-five years, and a compact that it should be the duty of the national army to shoot rebellious slaves, and the duty of free citizens, of the free States, to hunt down escaping slaves and surrender them to their owners in the slave States.

The failure of the prevailing system of education to promote rectitude and right thinking was so complete that negroes escaping from slavery were called “fugitives from justice!” Its failure was so complete that the very streets of Boston in which patriots had struggled to the death in the cause of liberty now echoed the groans of the slave, and resounded with the clank of his chains. Its failure was so complete that in Faneuil Hall, the cradle of liberty, slavery was justified. Its failure was so complete that a senator, for daring to characterize slavery as barbaric, was stricken down and beaten with a club, until he lay helpless in a pool of blood on the floor of the legislative hall of the great, free republic.

These are characteristics of the early civilizations, the civilizations of Greece and Rome. They are the product of selfishness, and they show that subjective educational processes—processes which proceed from the abstract to the concrete, thus violating the natural law of investigation—produce the same effects in the nineteenth century as they did in the first century.

Ethically, slavery was tried only by the test of self-interest. In the North, as in Europe, it was not profitable, and it faded away; in the South, in the cotton and rice fields, it was thought to be profitable, and it spread and flourished. That the opposition to slavery, at the North, did not grow out of education in the schools, is evident, because the sons of the Southern ruling class were educated in the high schools and colleges of the North; but they became, notwithstanding such training, almost to a man, slavery propagandists. The heinousness of slavery was perceptible only to those who had no personal interest in its perpetuation. It is plain that the effect of the education of the schools upon the youth of the country was to make them callous to the common impressions of right and wrong; in a word, to render them thoroughly selfish.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, if slavery had been as profitable at the North as it was at the South, it would have been perpetuated, and would have poisoned the infant civilization of America as that of Rome was vitiated and destroyed. Assuming the truth of this hypothesis, climate conditions, not education, saved this continent from the scourge of slavery. To the fact that a large part of the territory of the United States is situated in the temperate zone we owe the elimination of slavery from the social problem.

Existing social conditions in the United States do not differ materially from those of the chief countries of Europe. We have only a small standing army; but the sole great question which divided the people during the first hundred years of our political existence—slavery—had to be settled as such questions have been settled from the beginning of history, as savages settle all questions—by violence, by an appeal to the logic of brute force.

Our government differs from the governments of Europe both in principle and form, but the governmental influence is only one of many influences which unite to mould social habits. The democratic principle, adopted as the foundation of our political institutions, has not served to counteract the tendency to the formation of social class distinctions. The people lack the wisdom, or the virtue, or both, to insist upon the first prerequisite to even an approximation to social equality, namely, universal education. Of our population of fifty millions, five millions of persons, ten years old and over, are unable to read, and six millions are unable to write. In the last census decade we made the paltry gain of three per cent, in intelligence, but in 1880 we had six hundred thousand more illiterates than in 1870. Nearly two millions of the legal voters in the United States are illiterates. Every sixth man who offers his ballot at the polls is unable to write his name. Under such circumstances class distinctions of the most pronounced type are inevitable.

The tendency to the concentration of populations in cities in the United States is not less decided than it is in the countries of Europe. In 1820 the population of our cities constituted less than one-twentieth of the whole population of the country, but in 1880 it constituted more than one-fifth of the whole.

Cities have always been the chief source of societary disturbances. In the worst days of the Roman Empire tranquillity and prosperity reigned in many of the distant provinces. While at the city of Rome “every kind of vice paraded itself with revolting cynicism,” in the provinces “there was a middle class in which good-nature, conjugal fidelity, probity, and the domestic virtues were generally practised.”

Of one of the youngest large cities in the United States the late superintendent of a Training School for Waifs says, “Never in the history of this city has infant wretchedness stalked forth in such multiplied and such humiliating forms. It is hard to suppress the conviction that even Pagan Rome, in the corrupt age of Augustus, did not witness a more rapid and frightful declension in morals than that which can to-day be found in the city of Chicago.”

The most graphic description ever given of a waif came from the lips of John Morrissey.[94] He said of himself,

“I was, at the age of seven years, thrown a waif upon the streets of Dublin. I slept in alleys and under sidewalks. I disputed with other waifs the possession of a crust. We fought like young savages for the garbage that fell from the basket of the scullion. The strongest won and satisfied the cravings of hunger; the weakest starved. I had no idea that anything was to be gained by other means than brute force. Hence my code of moral and political ethics—the strongest man is the best man. I became a pugilist.”

The substantial citizen who passes the street waif with contempt should reflect that ten or a dozen years later he will meet him, a full-grown man, at the polls, still clothed in rags, perhaps, but his peer in all the rights of citizenship. It was the unfortunates of the dark alleys and noxious streets of New York—the waifs, the savages of the John Morrissey type—that made Tweedism[95] possible, that made robbery in the name of law possible, that made taxation the equivalent of confiscation in that city.

Mr. Charles Dickens, in “Bleak House,” in the course of a pen-picture of a wretched quarter of London, under the name of “Tom-all-alones,” shows how ignorance, poverty, and vice react upon society. He says, “There is not an atom of Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing but shall work its retribution through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high.”

The presence of the poison is already shown in the failure of justice. These waifs, grown to man’s estate, but destitute of education and moral principle, wielding the power of the ballot, desecrate the jury-room with their vile presence, and tug at the skirts of sheriffs, prosecuting officers, and judges, and notorious criminals escape punishment! So grievous has the abuse become that Judge Lynch has opened his summary, awful court in almost every State of the Union.

To say that this class menaces the government with destruction is to state it mildly. In every case of the failure of justice the government is in part subverted; for when crime goes unpunished, the law, violated in that particular instance, becomes a dead letter; and when lynching shall have become the rule, and the execution of the law the exception, government by law will have ceased to exist—it will have given way to government by force. Then the army will be invoked to shoot down the men for whose education the law failed to provide, in every city of the land, as it was invoked in Pittsburg in 1877.

What are we doing to avert this danger which threatens our institutions? With the exception of here and there a weak effort on the part of a few humanitarians, as in the training school referred to, we are leaving hundreds of thousands of waifs to develop into savages, and, what is worse, savages with the power to tax civilized people! We have a system of public schools into which such children as choose may enter to a certain limit, remain as long as they please, and depart when they please. But there are thousands of children in every large city who could not enter if they would, and who are not compelled to receive the civilizing benefits of education, and who hence join the army of waifs and study the art of savagery; and, as has been remarked, they go to swell the ranks of a populace as depraved as that which in Rome cried for “bread and circuses!” and sacked the city while it was in flames.

The defective, not to say vicious character of our system of education, is shown by the reckless course of our legislators on the subject of the disposition of the public domain. William the Conqueror, conceiving that any social revolution is incomplete until it disturbs the proprietorship of land, confiscated the entire landed estates of England, and conferred what remained of the proprietary, after reservations in the Crown, upon his retainers, the Normans. Eight hundred years have elapsed since the issue of William’s land-tenure edict, but it still remains the controlling feature of the British Constitution. It has compelled the deportation of millions of Englishmen; it has reduced the masses of Scotland to a grinding poverty, and converted their country into hunting-grounds for the amusement of the landlord class; it has depopulated Ireland, and exasperated almost to madness the remnant of her people.

But we have failed to profit by the example of England. Our legislators have been blind to the lessons of history, or they have been corrupt. They have been ignorant of political and social laws, or they have been wanting in rectitude. In the period of thirty years, ended in 1880, Congress gave to railway corporations over 240,000 square miles, or 154,067,553 acres, of the best public lands in the States and Territories of the Union—an area double that of the whole kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, including the adjacent isles.

On the 17th of March, 1883, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a history of these land grants, compiled by Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, under the following summary:

“The story of the dissipation of our great national inheritance—thrown away by Congress, wasted by the Land Office, stolen by thieves. A land monopoly worse than that of England, begotten in America. English monopoly is in families; American monopoly is in corporations; and corporations are the only aristocrats that have no souls, and never die.”

The following passages from the opening paragraphs of Mr. Lloyd’s history are reproduced here by permission of the author:

“The public are profoundly ignorant of the facts about the public land. They know, in a dim way, that it is passing out of their hands, and that huge monopolies are being created out of the lands which they meant should be the inheritance of the settler. The land set apart for homes for families has been made into empires for corporations. In the story recited below, every element of human fault and fraud will be seen to have been at work in the spoliation of the land of the people. Congress has been extravagant and has failed to act when part of the results of its extravagance might have been saved. The Land Office has been inadequately equipped by Congress, and has on its own account been careless, dishonest, and traitorous to the interests of the people. It has been wax in the hands of the great railroad corporations, but double-edged steel in the side of the poor settler. It has overruled decisions of the Supreme Court and nullified acts of Congress to betray its trust and enrich the railroads, but has refused even to exercise its discretion when the home of a settler, held by a righteous title, was to be confiscated at the demand of corporate greed. The niggardliness of Congress makes clerks, on salaries of twelve hundred to eighteen hundred dollars a year, untrained in the law, knowing nothing of the rules of evidence, judges of the law and facts in cases involving millions of dollars and thousands of homes. There is no worse chapter in the history of government than the facts we have to give showing the deliberate and heartless evictions of the European immigrant and the American settler in order to give their farms to covetous corporations. The land-grant roads have had millions of acres granted them by the Land Office in excess of the grants by Congress. The whole story is summed up in the recent remark of one who had thoroughly investigated the subject—that the history of the management of the land-grant roads by the Land Office is a history of the management of the Land Office by the railroads.

“No chapter in this story will be found of more sombre interest than the statements made as to the Supreme Court by the Senate Committee on Public Lands, in a report submitted by Senator Van Wyck recommending a bill to compel the railroads to pay taxes on their lands. Its decisions as to the titles of the railroads and the settlers to the lands, like those of a weathercock, have pointed the way the corporation blew its breath.”

The summary of Mr. Lloyd’s paper by the editor of the Tribune, as a preface to its publication, and the foregoing characterization of the acts of Congress, of the Land Office, and of the Supreme Court, by Mr. Lloyd, are fully justified by the alleged facts marshalled in the body of the sketch; and these allegations, after a year and a half of public scrutiny, stand unchallenged.

It would be difficult to conceive of a more reckless series of legislative acts than those through which the public domain in the United States has been squandered; and they are rendered either ignorant or vicious by the fact that in the vast empire surrendered almost totally without consideration, each legislator, in common with the people by and for whom he was deputed to act, had a personal interest. Through this series of acts of Congress the public domain was rudely wrested from its rightful owners, the people; the abnormal growth of corporate power unduly promoted, and a tendency to the concentration, in a few hands, of the landed estates of the country fostered.

The social and economic effects of this land legislation must be very great and far-reaching. Of the effects of the concentration of landed estates in a few hands we need not speak; they are sufficiently plain in England, Scotland, and Ireland.[96] But great corporations are a creation of yesterday; they are the product of steam. The railway, the factory, the mine of iron or coal, the furnace, the foundery, and the forge—these vast interests, chartered and endowed with certain muniments of sovereignty, are, as property, almost as indestructible as landed estates protected by the law of primogeniture. Men are trained from generation to generation to the care and conduct of them, and hence they are far less liable to waste and dispersion than private estates, which, in transmission, may be subjected to disastrous changes of management. Being also enterprises of a semi-public character, the public is bound, as well as their owners, to see to their preservation.

It is to a small number of the greatest of these great companies that Congress has given an empire of land in the West—an area double that owned by the lords of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In the railway proprietor of the United States the two great elements of power are united—steam and land. It needs no argument to show that only the nation can control the proprietor of both the land and the railway—the sole means of reaching a market for the products of the land. The appellative—kingship—to the railway proprietor is not a misnomer. He is a real potentate, both by virtue of the multitudes of men over whom he rules autocratically, and of the magnitude of the revenue he wields. Presidents come and go, but he remains. Legislators investigate him and report upon him, but they are met by a flat denial of the authority of either State or nation to interfere with his “vested rights.” He claims the right of himself and associates to control, absolutely, the internal commerce of the country; and this claim involves the pretence that they may confiscate merchandise seeking a market by charging, for carriage, the full value of the thing transported.

The railway and the factory, the two great products of steam, are new factors in the social problem, and to properly control them will require new wisdom; and the new wisdom is not to be drawn from old educational fountains.

State legislation has been as vicious as that of the nation. The people of nearly every State in the Union have been made the victims of great frauds and gross ignorance at the hands of their representatives. In nearly every State syndicates have been formed with the design of securing valuable franchises without consideration; and to effectuate such designs bribery has been freely and successfully resorted to in a vast number of cases. But rarely has the guilty agent of the guilty syndicate, or the perjured, purchased legislator been brought to justice, notwithstanding the fact that exposure has often followed the iniquity.

Evidence of the essentially European character of the American civilization is afforded by the prevalence of speculation.[E30] In Wall Street, New York, on the Board of Trade, Chicago, and on the exchanges of all large cities speculation rages. The real transactions of those business marts are very small, indeed, as compared with the transactions of a speculative character. On the New York Cotton Exchange the speculative trades in “futures” are thirty times more than the cotton sales. On the Chicago Board of Trade the speculative trades in “futures” are fifteen times more than the sales of grain and provisions, and so of the exchanges of all other large cities. To support these speculative operations fresh money is required to be constantly poured into the pool, and it is drawn from every class in the community. Very little of the “fresh money” is ever returned. Most of it remains in the hands of the pool managers, of those whose profession it is to manipulate the markets. Thus the fever of speculation extends from centre to circumference of the country, stimulating bad passions, creating distaste for labor, relieving the countryman of his surplus, and increasing the already overgrown fortune of the city operator. A writer on current topics, discussing this subject, says, “Put your finger on one of our great fortunes, and nine times out of ten you will feel underneath it the cold heart of some one who has mined on the San Francisco Stock Exchange, or packed pork on the Chicago Board of Trade, or built railroads in Wall Street.”[97]

A sufficient number of the salient features of American civilization have been brought under review to show that the new continent has not borne new social fruits. Under extremely favorable physical conditions—a country of vast resources, a wide range of climates, and a soil of great fertility—we planted old social forces, and old social evils are in process of rapid development. We are transplanted Europeans, controlled by European mental and moral habitudes. And the virile force, evoked by the splendid physical opportunities of a vast new country, so intensifies the struggle for wealth and power, that European social abuses are not only reproduced, but sometimes exaggerated in this land of boasted equal political rights.

But notwithstanding the fact that social tendencies in America seem to be similar to those of Europe, it is upon America alone that the eyes of mankind rest with an expression of ardent hopefulness. Nor is this hope destitute of a basis of rationality. It is in the United States, for the first time in all the ages, that a good reason can be given for indulging the sentiment of patriotism. Love of country here is a due appreciation of the value of the right of suffrage. The private soldier who goes forth to fight the battles of the United States is a man and citizen, and upon his return from the field he may, with the ballot, devote to the education of his children a share of the estate of the army contractor who amassed a fortune while he defended the country. All the property in the United States, whether honestly or dishonestly acquired, is subject to the order of the ballot of the citizen. It may be taken for war purposes, and it may be taken for educational purposes. In the universality of the right of suffrage lies the power of correcting all social evils. It is through the right of suffrage that the wrongs inflicted upon a too patient people by corrupt and ignorant legislation may be ultimately righted. By the suffrages of the people the tax bill is voted; and it is through the tax bill that the vast estates of corporations and individuals, whether obtained by dishonest practices or not, may be made to contribute to the thorough education of all the children of the country. And it is through the sentiment of patriotism thus inspired that the right of universal suffrage in the United States is destined to preservation forever.

The late proposition to limit suffrage in the city of New York is explainable only on the theory put forth in this chapter, that our civilization is the product of European ideas—that we are Europeans in disguise. On any other hypothesis it would be amazing. It is even now sufficiently startling that the proposition to restrict suffrage should precede the proposition to make education universal by making it compulsory, and to purge it of its glaring defects. Every attempt to restrict the right of suffrage in the United States will, however, fail. The right of self-government can be taken from the American people only by force. The American citizen will not vote away his right to vote, as the careless Greek sold his freedom, and as the Chinaman sells his life.

That American social abuses do not spring from free suffrage is evident, because similar abuses exist in countries where the masses have little or no share in the government. Social evils are the product of defective education. So long as European educational methods prevail in this country, so long European social abuses will characterize our civilization. Our education is scant in quantity and poor in quality; hence the standard of the suffrage is lowered by the presence of ignorance and depravity. But when the suffrage shall be better informed, it will be more honest; and when it shall have become more honest and more intelligent, it will have gained the power to grapple with social abuses.

Such examination of history as we have been able to make fails to disclose any radical change in educational methods for three thousand years. The charge of Mr. Herbert Spencer against the schools of England, to wit, “That which our school courses leave almost entirely out we thus find to be that which most nearly concerns the business of life”—this charge applies with almost as much force to the schools of the United States as to the Greek and Roman schools of rhetoric and logic. Bacon’s aphorism—“Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things”—is two hundred and fifty years old, but it has as yet exerted scarcely an appreciable influence upon the methods of our public schools. We still reverse the natural order of investigation proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, thus lumbering the mind of the student with trash which must be removed as a preliminary to the first step in the real work of education. We still impart a knowledge of words instead of a knowledge of things; we still ignore art, notwithstanding the fact that it is through art alone that education touches human life. We still inculcate contempt of labor, and teach the student how to “make his way in the world” by his wits, rather than by giving an equivalent for what he shall receive; and, worst of all, we continue, through subjective processes of thought, to charge the mind with selfishness, the essence of depravity.

Meantime, social problems press for a solution, a solution here and now. Our social problems cannot be settled as those of Europe have been, for two hundred years, by emigration. We have no Columbus, and if we had such an explorer, there is no new hemisphere for him to discover. The lesson of all history is, that selfish people cannot dwell together in unity. The struggle to secure more than a fair share of the products of the labor of all is sure to end in a quarrel; the quarrel ends in a revolution, and the revolution, under the glare of flames, drowns in blood the records of civilization. But in America the man must live with his fellows. As Mr. Henry D. Lloyd well says, in “Lords of Industry,” “Our young men can no longer go West; they must go up or down. Not new land, but new virtue must be the outlet for the future. Our halt at the shores of the Pacific is a much more serious affair than that which brought our ancestors to a pause before the barriers of the Atlantic, and compelled them to practise living together for a few hundred years. We cannot hereafter, as in the past, recover freedom by going to the prairies; we must find it in the society of the good.” [98]

If we are to find freedom only in the society of the good, we must create such a society—a society free from selfishness; for to the stability of society public spirit is essential, and with a pure public spirit selfishness is at war. Hence, in a system of education like the prevailing one, which promotes selfishness, the germs of social disintegration are present, and, from the beginning, the end may with absolute certainty be predicted. It follows that any hope of social reform is wholly irrational that does not spring from the postulate of a complete educational revolution.