# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 08/Discourse 2

II.
ON THE EDUCATION OF THE LABOURING CLASS.
It is sometimes fancied that here in New England the education of the mass of men and women, who do all the work of the world, is so near perfection that little need be done but keep what we have got to attain the highest destination of any people. But as things are sometimes seen more clearly by their reflection in an artificial mirror, than when looked at in the natural way, let us illustrate our own condition by contrasting it with another widely different. Let us suppose we were to go to some region in the heart of the African continent, and should find a highly cultivated nation, with towns and cities, and factories and commerce, equipped with the thousand arts which diffuse comfort all over society, but should find the whole class of lawyers were ignorant men. That they could scarcely read and write, and never read anything beyond the newspapers, books of legal forms, and similar matters of the most trifling magnitude. That they could repeat the laws inherited from their ancestors, or enacted from time to time by their contemporaries, but never dreamed of inquiring whether these laws were right or wrong, still less of examining the principle on which they rested, or ought to rest, and then of attempting to improve them. That they generally aimed to get on with the smallest outlay of education, the least possible expenditure of thought wherewith they could keep their sorry station ​of legal drudges, yet still that the nation looked to them, in some measure, for the protection of its legal rights.
Let us imagine also, that in our fabulous country the physicians were in the same state of ignorance with the lawyers. That they had inherited from their fathers a few traditional rules of medical practice, which they applied mechanically to all sorts of cases, but never thought of looking into the cause or process of disease, of discovering the laws of health, of devising new remedies, or making the old more efficacious. That they took little care to get an accurate knowledge of their own profession, and no pains at all to increase their stock of general knowledge, acquire mental skill, and give a generous and healthful development to all the faculties with which God endows the race of men. That they made their calling a drudgery, which gave them daily bread, but nothing more. That their whole life was mere handicraft. That they started in their profession with a slender outfit of education, either special or general; usually grew more and more stupid after they were five-and-twenty, and only in rare instances made a continual and life-long progress in what becomes a man, thus growing old in being taught, and attaining in life a complete manhood; but still that the public depended on this class for the preservation of the general health.
To go still further, let us fancy that the clergy also wandered in the same way of ignorance, and that class, which in some countries is the best instructed, had here the least cultivation. That, taking the advice which the devil, in a popular legend, gives to a student of divinity, they “stuck to words, and words only.” That they could repeat a few prayers, learned by rote from their predecessors; took their religion on trust from their fathers, never asking if the one were perfect, or the other true. That they both trembled and cursed when the least innovation was made in either. That they could go through the poor mummery of the African ritual with sonorous unction, by their bigotry making an abomination of what should be a delight, but never attempting to understand what the service meant. That they could give official advice to the people on days of religious ceremony, which advice consisted solely of commonplace maxims of prudence, virtue, and religion, which all but the children knew as ​well as they. That the mass of the clergy never dreamed of reading a book which had thought in it; never made that “vehement application of mind” which the great Roman called “study;” knew little of the history of their own country, or the state of other lands; made no scientific study of theology, which it was their duty to teach and explain. That they paid no attention to science; knew no more of the stars or the flowers, the laws of matter or the laws of mind, than the kindred clod they trod down as they walked. That literature was a department they never entered, either as host or guest. That they were ignorant of the various forms their religion had assumed, and knew little of even the rise and progress of the faith they professed; sometimes taught as old what was of but few years' existence, and blasted things as new which really were of ancient days. In a word, let us fancy that they were the most ignorant part of the population; spending their leisure (of which they had abundance) in sleep; in lounging about the resorts of the idle; in retailing or inventing both small gossip and graver scandal; in chattering of the last funeral or the next wedding; in talking African politics, whereof they knew nothing but words; in smoking; in chewing the Betel-nut; in sitting at home more dead than alive. That when asked to improve and grow wiser, they replied, “We know enough already to perform our official duties. More learning, accomplishment, and skill, might make us mad, and lead to innovation; and besides, we have no leisure to study, and could only become wise by neglecting a well-known duty.” Ignorant as they were, let us suppose the refined and cultivated African public depended on them for the support of religion.
Now to make this picture of society more complete, let us imagine that these professions had fallen into disrepute, and few not born therein ever entered them, except men unfit for any other employment, who found a natural inward vocation for these as the proper business of the ignorant and the stupid. That soon as a noble spirit, accidentally born in their ranks, resolved to improve himself, educate his family, and really did set his feet forward in this work, and thought for himself, and took time to study and grow wiser, urging others to do the same, that he was met with this retort: “Why get more wisdom? ​Can you not eat, and drink, and sleep, without wisdom? Can you not, by diligent prudence, leave your children, who shall come after you in the same craft, to eat more daintily, and drink in greater excess, and have more leisure, and sleep with more delicateness, and all this with no wisdom at all? Why, then, waste so much time and labour in this monstrous bugbear of an ‘education?’ Do you not know there is something better, both for yourself and your children, than a mind, heart, and soul, perfectly cultivated as God designed them to be? Think you an instructed soul is better than a well-fed body, or that the latter is not worth the most without the former? Besides, do you not know that all wisdom needed in the professions comes by nature, like hands and feet? Sir, you rebel against Providence, you are a fool, and we pity you.” Suppose they sought out the wisdom of all the ancients, and demonstrated by proof irrefragable that professional men had always been the most ignorant in the land, and it had come to be a proverb that “Dunces and fools made the best lawyers, physicians, and clergymen;” that, reasoning as some always do, they declared “what has been must be for ever,” and so accused the reformers of violating the fundamental article of God's constitution, which was, that an error, or a sin, which had once got foot-hold of the earth, should never be dislodged, or even molested.
Imagine, on the other hand, that while these three classes were sunk in the most desperate ignorance, the farmers, the butchers, the mechanics, the traders, the haberdashers of all sorts, were instructed men, who thought for themselves. That they had free schools for all ages, and that in abundance; academies and colleges, where learning lit her gentle flame, and genius shed down the light of her God-given inspiration to guide the young to wisdom and virtue. That, besides these general institutions, all supported at the public expense, they had specific establishments for each particular art or science. That the farmers had schools for agriculture, and the mechanics for the science of their art, and the merchants for commerce, and that all classes of the people, from the cooper to the king—except the drones of those three professions—were intelligent and instructed men; had minds well accomplished, good manners, refined amusements, and met together for the ​interchange of thoughts no less than words, and yearly grew up to be a nobler population.
Let us add still further, to put the last touch to this ideal picture, that when one was born the son of a lawyer, a physician, or a clergyman, and gifted by Heaven with better parts than the mass of men, or when by any adventure he became desirous of growth in qualities that become a man, he left the calling of his fathers, became a cooper, a fisherman, or a blacksmith, solely for the sake of the education he could get in the trade, which he fancied he could not get in the profession, and that he did this, even when he loved the profession he left, having a natural aptitude therefor, and hated the particular craft to which love of perfection impelled him, and that, as a natural consequence, there were men in all these trades who had little natural taste, or even ability, for their employment, who longed to quit it, and were retained therein when its ranks were over-crowded, and themselves as good as useless, solely because they saw no chance to educate their better nature in any of the three professions.
What should we say to this state of things? what to the fact, that here were three classes of men, who, instead of getting the most they could of wisdom, were content to take up the most beggarly pittance wherewith their drudgery could be done? Doubtless we should say it was a very sad state of affairs, most foolish and monstrous. It was wrong that these classes should continue in ignorance, with no effort made for their liberation. It was wrong the ablest heads in Africa—who are the natural sovereigns of their land—did not take up the matter, and toil day and night to redress an evil so striking and fearful. It was doubly wrong that strong minds left a calling in which they were born, to which they were adapted by nature and choice, to seek out of it an education they might find in it, had they the manliness to make the search. It was false in them to desert the calling for which nature made them, seeking to rise above it, not seeking to raise their calling to their own stature. We should thank Heaven that we had a Christian rule for the strong helping the weak, and should say, “Such evils could exist only in a heathen land,” and pious men would sail in the next ship to set matters right.
​But we have only to change the names a little, and, instead of lawyers, physicians, and clergymen, to read “the greater part of labouring men and women,” and this fabulous country is in the midst of Massachusetts, not the heart of Africa. Of us is the fable told, and on this body of men depends the ark of our political salvation. In New England the men of these three professions are generally the best educated men in the land. They go diligently through a long process of general training, well adapted to exercise and strengthen the memory, judgment, and imagination, and afford a variety and compass of useful knowledge. They spend years, likewise, in gaining the information and skill requisite for their peculiar craft. We have colleges for the general training, and other seminaries for the special education of these men; for all see the advantage which accrues to the public from having educated lawyers, physicians, and clergymen, in its ranks. But meantime the education of all the others, as a general rule, is grossly neglected. But there seems little reason, if any at all, why men destined for these three professions should be better educated than farmers and mechanics. An educated lawyer, his mind stored with various information, memory, fancy, judgment, and all his faculties quick and active, with skill to turn them all to the best account in his special calling, is, no doubt, a safeguard, an ornament, and a blessing to any country; and he is this, not because he is a lawyer, but a free, educated man, living man-like, and would be just as useful were he a blacksmith or a carpenter; for it is not the place a man stands in which makes him the safeguard, ornament, and blessing, but the man who stands in the place.
It is time that we in New England had given up that old notion, that a man is to be educated that he may by his education serve the State, and fill a bar or a pulpit, be a captain or a constable; time we had begun to act, and in good earnest, on this principle, that a man is to be educated because he is a Man, and has faculties and capabilities which God sent him into this world to develop and mature. The education of classes of men is, no doubt, a good thing, as a single loaf is something in a famished household. But the education of all born of woman is a plain duty. If reason teaches anything, it is this. If Christianity teaches ​anything, it is that men serve God with their mind, heart, and soul; and this, of course, demands an education of mind, heart, and soul, not only in lawyers, physicians, and clergymen, but in all the sons and daughters of Adam. Men are to seek this for themselves; the public is to provide it, not because a man is to fill this or that station, and so needs the culture, but because he is a man, and claims the right, under the great charter whereby God created him an immortal soul.
Now, it is true that we have, here and there, an instructed man, all his faculties awake and active, a man master of himself, and thus attaining his birthright, “dominion over all flesh.” But still the greater part of men and women, even here, are ignorant. The mark they aim at is low. It is not a maxim generally admitted, or often acted upon, that this world is a school; that man is in it, not merely to eat and drink, and vote, and get gain or honours (as many Americans seem to fancy), but that he is here, and to do all these things for the sake of growing up to the measure of a complete man. We have put the means for the end, and the end for the means.
Every one sees the change education makes in animals. We could not plough with a wild buffalo, nor hunt with a dog just taken savage from the woods. But here the advantage is not on the animal's side. His education is against his nature. It lessens his animal qualities, so that he is less a dog or a buffalo than he was before. With man the change it produces is greater still, for here it is not against nature. It enhances his human qualities, and he is more a man after it than before. All the difference between the English scholar, with his accomplishment and skill, and the English boor, who is almost an animal; all the difference between the wise and refined Brahmin, and the debased and enslaved Pariah; all the difference between the best educated men of Massachusetts and the natives of New Zealand, ignorant, savage, cannibal as they are, comes of this circumstance: one has had a better education than the other. At birth, they were equally of the kingdom of heaven. The same humanity burns in all hearts: the same soul ebbs and flows in all that are born of woman. The peculiarity of each man—slight and ​almost imperceptible when measured by his whole nature—and the particular circumstances to which he is exposed, make all this difference between savage and civilized. Some five-and-twenty centuries ago our ancestors, in the wilds of Europe, were quite as ignorant, cruel, and savage, as these men of New Zealand, and we have become what we are only through the influence of culture and education, which ages have produced and matured. But each child in Boston is born a savage as much as at Otaheite. No doubt, in the passage our fathers went through from the savage to the civilized state, much has been lost, but more is won, and it is time to retrieve what is lost, and grasp more for the future. No doubt there are some in this, as in all civilized countries, who are still barbarians, and by no means gainers through the civilization of their brethren; but it is time the foremost turned round to look after their straggling brothers. If education, through schools, churches, books, and all the institutions of society, were neglected, all over the earth, for a single generation, the whole race would fall back into a savage state. But if the culture of one single generation could be enhanced, the spiritual welfare of mankind would also be enhanced to the end of time.
It must appear plain to all who will think, that after providing for the support and comfort of the body—which must be the basis of all spiritual operations—the great work of the men and women now on the earth is to educate themselves and the next generation of men and women rising up to take their place. All things which do not tend, directly or indirectly, to one of these two ends—the physical or the spiritual development of man—are worse than worthless. We are sent into the world that we might accomplish this work of education. The world without harmonizes most beautifully with the craving spirit within. If a man start with the requisite outfit, and use diligently the means before him, all the callings of life, the vicissitudes that chequer our days, the trials we are in, the crosses we carry, our hopes and our fears, our foes and our friends, our disappointment and success, are all guides and instructors to help us on, be our condition what it may.
Now, it may be laid down as a rule that will stand the test of rigid scrutiny, that all men are to be educated to ​the greatest possible extent; that education is to be regarded as an end, valuable for itself, and not simply as a means, valuable because conducive to some other end; and, also, that the whole community owes each individual in it the best education his nature, and the circumstances of the public, will allow. But, in opposition to this rule, demanding the education of all, it may be said, as it always has been, by the educated themselves, that there must be an educated class it is true, but also, from the imperfection of man, the necessity of the case, and the very nature of things, there must be an ignorant class also; that the hard work necessary for the comfortable subsistence of man in society renders it indispensable that seven-eighths of men should continue in almost hopeless ignorance. This doctrine has been taught these thousand years; and while it has sometimes been accepted by the wise and the benevolent, whom the difficulty of the case forced to despair, it has too generally become the creed of the strong, and the indolent, and the selfish. But at first sight it seems to belong to that same class of sayings with the remark of a distinguished “divine” of the Church, that if there were no vice to hate, there would be no virtue to love; and this other of a similar “divine” of the State, that without slavery in the one class there would be no freedom in the other. No doubt, under any possible circumstances, there will always be a great difference in the attainments and powers of men, for this difference originates in the difference of endowments God bestows: no education can prevent this. But is there any argument to show, that the labouring men of New England cannot attain as good an education as the mass of lawyers and clergymen now possess?
One great argument in support of the common notion, that the majority of the human family must always be ignorant, is drawn from history. Men appeal to this authority, and quote precedents, in great numbers, to show it has always been so, and so must always be. But it does not follow the future must be just like the past, for hitherto no two ages have been just alike. God does not repeat himself, so to say, nor make two ages or two men just alike. The history of past times does indeed show, that the mass of men have always been ignorant, and oppressed likewise. But few men in America think this ​a sound argument to justify oppression. Is it stronger for ignorance? Let us look more carefully at this same history, which shows that there always has been an ignorant class: perhaps it has other things to say likewise. It shows a progress in man's condition, almost perpetual, from the first beginnings of history down to the present day. To look at the progress of our own ancestors: two thousand years gone by no man within the bounds of Britain could read or write; three-fourths of the people were no better than slaves; all were savage heathens. If a cultivated Greek had proposed to bring in civilization and the arts, no doubt Adelgither, or some other island chief, would have mocked at the introduction of agriculture and the mechanic arts, and would foretell the sinking of the firm land through the wrath of “all-powerful Hu,” if such measures were attempted. Within a very few centuries there was no man in England who could read and write except the clergy, and very few of that class. No doubt it was then a popular maxim with bishops and prebends, that men of each other class, from the cobbler to the courtier, were so engaged in their peculiar craft, they could not be taught to read and write. The maxim, no doubt, was believed. Nay more, even now there are, in that same England, men of wealth, education, rank, and influence, who teach that the labouring people ought not to be taught to read and write, and, therefore, they hang—perilous position—as heavy weights on the wheels of reform. Yet agriculture and the arts came into the land; one by one, as time passed by, men came up from the nobles, the gentry, the people, learned to read and write, and that to good purpose, and labouring men are now beginning to thrive on what has been branded as poison. Now, then, these opinions, that labouring men ought not to be taught even to read the Bible; that none but the clergy need literary education; that agriculture would sink the island—are not these worth quite as much as that oft-repeated maxim, that a sound, generous, manly education is inconsistent with a life of hard work? Experience has shown that civilization did not provoke the vengeance of Hu, the all-powerful; that men can be instructed in letters and science, though not priests; that a labouring population, one most wofully oppressed by ​unjust labour, can learn to read, at least radical newspapers, and the Bible, still more radical in a false state of things. Experience daily shows us men who, never relaxing their shoulders from the burthen of manly toil, yet attain an education of mind better than that of the most cultivated Englishman seven centuries ago. No man needs dogmatize in this matter. Few will venture to prophesy; but, reasoning from history, and the gradual progress it reveals, are we to suppose the world will stop with us? Is it too much to hope, that in our free, wealthy, Christian land, the time will come when that excellence of education, that masterly accomplishment of mind, which we think now is attainable only by four or five men out of ten thousand, shall become so common that he will be laughed at, or pitied, who has it not? Certainly, the expectation of this result is not so visionary as that of our present state would have appeared a single century ago. To win this result we must pay its price. An old proverb represents the Deity saying to man, “What would you have? Pay for it, and take it.” The rule holds good in education, as in all things else. A man cannot filch it, as coin, from his neighbours, nor inherit it from his fathers; for David had never a good son, nor Solomon a wise one. It must be won, each man toiling for himself. But many are born of the ignorant and the poor; they see not how to gain this pearl for themselves; as things now are, they find no institution to aid them, and thus grow up and die bodies, and no more. The good sense, the manly energy, of the natives of New England, their courage, and fortitude, and faith—the brain in the head, the brain in the hand—have hitherto made them successful in all they undertake. We have attained physical comfort to such a degree that the average duration of human life with us is many times greater than in Italy, the most civilized of states, sixteen centuries ago; physical comfort with philanthropists, they never dreamed of in their gayest visions. We have attained, also, a measure of political and civil freedom to which the fairest states of antiquity, whether in Greece, Egypt, or Judea, were all strangers; civil freedom which neither the Roman nor Athenian sage deemed possible in his ideal state. Is it, then, too much to hope—reasoning from the past—that when ​the exhaustless energies of the American mind are turned to this subject, we shall go further still, and, under these more favourable circumstances, rear up a noble population, where all shall be not only well fed, but well instructed also; where all classes, rich and poor, if they wish, may obtain the fairest culture of all their powers, and men be free in fact as well as in name? Certainly he must have the gift of prophecy who shall tell us this cannot be. As we look back, there is much in the retrospect to wound and make us bleed. But what then? what is not behind is before us. A future, to be worked for and won, is better than a past, to be only remembered.
If we look at the analogies of nature, all is full of encouragement. Each want is provided for at the table God spreads for his many children. Every sparrow in the fields of New England has “scope and verge enough,” and a chance to be all its organization will allow. Can it be, then, that man—of more value than many sparrows, of greater worth than the whole external creation—must of necessity have no chance to be all his nature will allow, but that seven-eighths of the human family are doomed to be “cabined, cribbed, confined,” kept on short allowance of everything but hard work, with no chance to obtain manhood, but forced to be always dwarfs and pigmies, manikins in intellect, not men? Let us beware how we pay God in Cæsar's pence, and fasten on eternal wisdom what is the reproach of our folly, selfishness, and sin. The old maxim, that any one, class or individual, must be subservient to the State, sacrificed to the sin and interest of the mass—that kindred doctrine, a fit corollary, that he who works with the hand can do little else—is a foul libel on nature and nature’s God. It came from a state of things false to its very bottom. Pity we had not left it there. We are all gifted with vast faculties, which we are sent into this world to mature; and if there is any occupation in life which precludes a man from the harmonious development of all his faculties, that occupation is false before reason and Christianity, and the sooner it ends the better.
We all know there are certain things which society owes to each man in it. Among them are a defence from violence; ​justice in matters between man and man; a supply of comforts for the body, when the man is unable to acquire them for himself; remuneration for what society takes away. Our policy, equally wise and humane, attempts to provide them for the humblest child that is born amongst us, and in almost every case these four things are actually provided. But there is one more excellent gift which society owes to each; that is, a chance to obtain the best education the man's nature will allow and the community afford. To what end shall we protect a man's body from war and midnight violence; to what end give him justice in the court-house, repay him for what society takes to itself; to what end protect him from cold and hunger, and nakedness and want—if he is left in ignorance, with no opportunity to improve in head, or heart, or soul? If this opportunity be not given, the man might, as it were, bring an action before Heaven's high Chancery, and say, “I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not. Ignorant—ye would not instruct me. Weak and unarmed—ye put me in the forefront of the battle, where my utter ruin was unavoidable. I had strong passions, which ye did not give me religion to charm down. I waxed wicked, and was scarred all over with the leprosy of sin, but ye took no pity on me. I hungered and thirsted after the bread of life, not knowing my need—ye gave me a stone, the walls of a gaol; and I died, ignominious and unpitied, the victim of society, not its foe.”
Here, in Massachusetts, it seems generally admitted, the State owes each man the opportunity to begin an education of himself. This notion has erected the fair and beautiful fabric of our free schools; the cradle of freedom, the hope of the poor, the nursery of that spirit which upholds all that is good in Church and State. But as yet only a beginning is made. We are still on short allowance of wisdom and cultivation; not a gill of water a day for each man. Our system of popular education, even where it is most perfect, is not yet in harmony with the great American idea, which has fought our battles with the elements, built up our institutions, and made us a great people. It is an old Transatlantic system of education which is too often followed, not congenial with our soil, our atmosphere, our people. From feudal times, and governments which ​knew little of the value of the human soul, the equality of all before God, the equal rights of strong and weak, their equal claims for a manly education—from them we have derived the notion, that only a few need a liberal, generous education, and that these few must be the children of wealth, or the well-born sons of genius, who have many hands and dauntless courage, and faith to remove mountains, who live on difficulties, and, like gravitation itself, burst through all impediments. There will always be men whom nothing can keep uneducated; men like Franklin and Bowditch, who can break down every obstacle; men gifted with such tenacity of resolution, such vigour of thought, such power of self-control; they live on difficulties, and seem strongest when fed most abundantly with that rugged fare; men that go forth strong as the sun and as lonely, nor brook to take assistance from the world of men. For such no provision is needed. They fight their own battles, for they are born fully armed, terrible from their very beginning. To them difficulty is nothing. Poverty but makes them watchful. Shut out from books and teachers, they have instructors in the birds and beasts, and whole Vatican libraries in the trees and stones. They fear no discouragement. They go on the errand God sent them, trusting in him to bless the gift he gave. They beat the mountain of difficulty into dust, and get the gem it could not hide from an eye piercing as Argus. But these men are rare, exceptions to the rule, strong souls in much-enduring flesh. Others, of greater merit perhaps, but less ruggedness of spirit, less vigour of body, who cannot live with no sympathy but the silent eloquence of nature, and God's rare visitations of the inner man, require the aid of some institutions to take them up where common schools let them fall, and bear them on till they can walk alone. Over many a village churchyard in the midst of us it may still be writ, with no expression of contingency—
“Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
“ Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,
“Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
“ Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
“But knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
“ Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll:
“Chill penury repressed their noble rage, “ And froze the genial current of the soul.”
​To have a perfect people, said pagan Plato, we must have perfect institutions; which means, in plain English, to enable labouring men and women to obtain a good education, we must have some institution to go further than our common schools.
But this great subject of public education as yet excites but little interest among us. The talk made about it, by a few wise and good men, proves only that we have it not. It is only lost goods that men cry in the streets. We acknowledge that we have no scholars to match the learned clerks of other lands, where old institutions and the abundant leisure of the wealthy have trained men to accomplishment and skill we never reach. We boast, and with reason, of the superior education of the great mass of men and women with us. Certain it is that learning is more marked for its diffusion in the mass than its accumulation in the individual. It is with it as with bread in a besieged city. Each person gets a mouthful, but no one a full meal. This, no doubt, is better than it would be for many to perish with hunger, while a few had enough and to spare. Some other countries are worse off in this particular than ourselves. The more the pity. We may rather weep for them than rejoice for ourselves. We can only boast of building poorly on the foundation our fathers laid—laid so nobly in their toil and want and war. An absolute monarch in Europe, recently deceased, not holding his place by the people's choice, but kept on his throne by hired bayonets, and, therefore, feeling no judicial accountability to them, indebted to a large amount, has yet done more for the education of all classes of his people, than all the politicians of the twenty-six States have done with the wealth of the public lands and the surplus revenue before them, and the banner of freedom over their heads. We have orators enough to declaim at the corners of the street about the War of Independence, now the blows are all over; and the sins of George III., now he is dead and forgotten; in favour of a “National Bank” or a “Sub-treasury,” as the popular current happens to set; but very few to take up the holy and neglected cause of education, insisting that all men, rich and poor, and low and high, shall receive this priceless boon. Alas for us! These few are received with cold hands and empty houses, ​while the village brawler, ranting of politics, collects the huzzaing crowd from nine towns round. The reason is plain: there are ins for those out, and outs for those in. A “National Bank” and a “Sub-treasury” have dollars in them, at least the people are told that it is so; men hope to get dollars out of them; while the most “promising” friend of education offers only wisdom, virtue, religion, things that never appear in the price-current, and will not weigh down an ounce in the town scales. We know the worth of dollars—which is something—yes, it is much. Give the dollars their due. But alas, the worth of educated men and women we do not know!
The fact that in our country and these times men find it necessary to leave a particular calling, which they like, and for which they are fitted by nature and choice—that of a shoemaker, a blacksmith, or a tanner—and enter one of the three professions, for which they have no fondness, nor even capacity, solely for the sake of an education, shows very plainly into what a false position we have been brought. We often lay the blame on Providence, and it seems generally thought to be a law of the Most High, that a man, with the faculties of an angel, should be born into the world, and live in it threescore years and ten, in the blameless pursuit of some calling indispensable to society, and yet die out of it without possibility of developing and maturing these faculties; thus at the last rather ending a long death, than completing a life. This seems no enactment of that Lawgiver. He made man upright, and we have sought out many inventions, some of them very foolish. As things now are, an excellent brazier, a tolerable tinker or tailor, is often spoiled, to make an indifferent lawyer, a sluggish physician, coadjutor of death, or a parson whose “drowsy tinkling lulls the distant fold,” solely because these men, innocent of sinister designs, wanted an education which, as things were, could not readily be got in the trade, but came as a requisite in the profession. Now, in all countries the mass of men must work; in our land they must work and rule likewise. Some method must, therefore, be found to educate this mass, or it is plain our free institutions must go to the ground, for ignorance and freedom cannot exist together more than fire and water in the same vessel.
​No doubt we have done much. But how much more remains to be done! That absolute monarch, before spoken of, has done more than all the free Americans in this matter, and made his people our superiors in almost every department of intellectual, moral, and religious education. The American mind has never yet been applied in earnest to this great work, as to commerce, and clearing land, building factories and railroads. We do not yet realize the necessity of educating all men. Accordingly, men destined for the “learned” professions, as they are called, hasten through the preparatory studies thereof, and come half-educated to the work. The labouring man starts with a very small capital of knowledge or mental skill, and then thinks he has no time for anything but work; never reads a book which has thought in it; never attempts to make his trade teach him: “getting and spending, he lays waste his powers.” Children are hurried from the common school just as they begin to learn, and thus half its benefits are lost. The old rule, that “what is gained in time is lost in power,” is quite as true in education as in mechanics, as our experience is teaching us at great cost. Since the advantages of the common school are not fully enjoyed, many, whose voices might be heard, do not see the necessity of a higher series of free schools—at least one in a county—which should do for all what the college now does for a part. Those only feel the want of such who are without voice in the commonwealth, whose cry only Heaven hears. If such existed, or, even without them, if the common schools were what all might be, and some are, and their advantages properly used, then the mechanic, the farmer, the shopkeeper, might start with a good capital of knowledge, good habits of study, and his trade, if temperately pursued, would teach him as much as the professions teach men embarked therein. Were two men of the same ability, and the same intellectual discipline, to embark in life, one a clergyman and the other a farmer, each devoting eight or ten hours a day to his vocation, spending the rest of his time in the same wise way, the superiority in twenty years could scarcely be on the clergyman's side.
But besides this lack of mental capital with which labouring men set out in life, there is another evil, and ​even greater, which comes of the mechanical and material tendency of our countrymen at this time. They ask a result which they can see and handle; and since wisdom and all manly excellence are not marketable nor visible commodities, they say they have no time for mental culture. A young mechanic, coming into one of our large country towns, and devoting all the spare time he could snatch from labour or sleep to hard study, was asked by an older companion, "What do you want to be?” supposing he wished to be a constable, or a captain, or a member of the “great and general court,” it may be. The answer was, “I wish to be a man.” “A man!” exclaimed the questioner, thinking his friend had lost his wits. “A man! are you not twenty-one years old, and six feet high?” Filled with this same foolish notion, men are willing to work so many hours of the blessed day that the work enslaves the man. He becomes hands, and hands only; a passive drudge, who can eat, drink, and vote. The popular term for working men, “hands,” is not without meaning; a mournful meaning, too, if a man but thinks of it. He reads little that of unprofitable matter, and thinks still less than he reads. He is content to do nothing but work. So old age of body comes upon him before the prime years of life, and imbecility of spirit long before that period. That human flesh and blood continue to bear such a state of things, whence change is easy, this is no small marvel. The fact that wise men and Christian men do not look these matters in the face, and seek remedies for evils so widespread, proves some sad things of the state of wisdom and Christianity with us.
Many labouring men now feel compelled to toil all of the week-days with such severity that no time is left for thought and meditation, the processes of mental growth, and their discipline of mind is not perfect enough to enable them to pursue this process while about their manual work. One man in the village, despising a manly growth of his whole nature, devotes himself exclusively to work, and so in immediate results surpasses his wiser competitor, who, feeling that he is not a body alone, but a soul in a body, would have time for reading, study, and the general exercise and culture of his best gifts. The wiser man, ashamed to be distanced by his less gifted neighbour; afraid, too, of public opinion, which ​still counts beef and brandy better than a wise mind and a beautiful soul; unwilling to wear coarse raiment, and fare like a hermit, that his mind be bravely furnished within, and sumptuously fed—devotes himself also exclusively to his toil, and the evil spreads. The few men with us who have leisure enough and to spare rarely devote it to the Christian work of lightening the burthens of their brethren. Rather, by withdrawing their necks from the common yoke, do they increase the weight for such as are left faithful. Hence the evil yearly becomes worse—as some men fear—and the working man finds his time for study abridged more and more. Even the use of machinery has hitherto done little good in this respect to the class that continues to work. Give a child a new knife, he will only cut himself. The sacramental sin of the educated and wealthy amongst us, is the notion, that work with the hands is disgraceful. While they seek to avoid the “disgrace,” others must do more than their natural share. The lazy man wastes his leisure; the industrious, who does his work, has no leisure to enjoy. Affairs will never take their true shape, nor the labouring class have an opportunity to obtain the culture reason demands for them, until sounder notions of labour, and a more equitable division thereof, prevail. When he works who is fit, and he thinks who can, thought and labour may go hand in hand. The peaceful and gradual change already apparent will doubtless effect the object in time, and for such an issue the world can afford to wait some few years. It is common, as it is easy and wicked, to throw the whole blame of this matter on the rich and educated. But this sin belongs to the whole community; though it must be most heavily charged upon the strongest heads, who should think for the weak, and help them to think for themselves.
But even now much may be done, if men gather up the fragments of time. The blessed Sabbath—in spite of the superstitious abuse thereof, the most valuable relic the stream of time has brought us—in half a century allows more than seven solid years redeemed from toil. There are the long nights of winter, the frequent periods when inclement weather forbids labour in the fields. All of these, taken together, afford a golden opportunity to him who, having previous instruction, has resolution to employ ​it well. Books, too, those “ships of thought” that sail majestic on through time and space, bear their rich treasure down to old and young, landing them upon every shore. Their magic influence reaches all who will open their arms. The blessing they bring may quicken the labourer's mind, and place him where he did not stand before. The thought of others stirs his thought. His lamp is lit at some great thinker's urn, and glitters with perennial glow. Toil demands his hands; it leaves his thought fetterless and free. To the instructed man his trade is a study; the tools of his craft are books; his farm a gospel, eloquent in its sublime silence; his cattle and corn his teachers; the stars his guides to virtue and to God; and every mute and every living thing, by shore or sea, a heaven-sent prophet to refine his mind and heart. He is in harmony with nature, and his education goes on with the earth and the hours. Many such there are in the lanes and villages of New England. They are the hope of the land. But these are the favoured sons of genius, who, under ill-starred circumstances, make a church and a college of their daily work. To all, as things now are, this is not possible. But when all men see the dignity of manual work, few will be so foolish as to refuse the privilege of labour, though many are now wicked enough to shrink from it as a burthen. Then it will be a curse to none, but a blessing to all. Then there will be time enough for all to live as men; the meat will not be reckoned more than the life, nor the soul wasted to pamper the flesh. Then some institution, not yet devised, may give the mass of men a better outfit of education, and art supply what nature did not give, and no man, because he toils with his hands, be forced to live a body and no more.
The education which our people need, apart from strength and skill in their peculiar craft, consists in culture of mind, of the moral and the religious nature. What God has joined can never safely be put asunder. Without the aid of practised moral principle, what mental education can guide the man? Without the comfort and encouragement of religion, what soul, however well endowed with intellectual and moral accomplishments, can stand amid the ceaseless wash of contending doubts, passions, interests, and fears? All partial education is false. Such as would ​cultivate the mind alone soon fail of the end. The ship spreads wide her canvas, but has neither ballast nor helm. It has been said the education of the labouring class is safe neither for the nation nor the class; and if only the understanding is cultivated, there is a shadow of truth somewhere about the remark. An educated knave or pirate is, no doubt, more dangerous than a knave or pirate not educated. It appears in some countries that crime increases with education. This fact has caused the foes of the human race to shout long and loud, and the noise of their shouting comes over the Atlantic to alarm us. The result could have been foreseen when the education was intellectual chiefly. But even then great crimes against the human person become rare; and who shall say the increased crimes against property have not come from the false system on which property is held, quite as much as from the false system of education? Still the grand rule holds good, that intellectual education alone is fearfully insufficient. Let the whole nature of man be developed. Educate only the moral nature, men are negatively virtuous, as a dead man will neither lie nor steal. They who seek only religious education soon degenerate into bigots, and become the slaves of superstition, the tools of designing and crafty men, as both ancient and recent history assures us. Man only is manlike, and able to realize the idea for which he was made, when he unfolds all of his powers, mind, heart, and soul; thinks, feels, and worships as reason, conscience, and religion demand; thus uniting in himself the three great ideas of the true, the good, and the holy, which make up the sum of beauty, the altogether beautiful of mortal life.
It is to be believed the American mind will one day be turned to its greatest object, the rearing up of a manly people, worthy to tread these hills, and breathe this air, and worship in the temples our fathers built, and lie down in their much-honoured graves. Who shall say the dream of men, now regarded as visionary, shall not one day become a reality blessed and beautiful? If the unconquerable energies of our people were turned to this work; if the talent and industry so profusely squandered on matters of no pith or moment, or wasted in petty quarrels, during a single session of Congress; if half the ​enthusiasm and zeal spent in a single presidential election, were all turned to devise better means of educating the people—we cannot help thinking matters would soon wear a very different aspect.
One of two conclusions we must accept. Either God made man with desires that cannot be gratified on earth, and which yet are his best and most Godlike desires, and then man stands in frightful contradiction with all the rest of nature; or else it is possible for all the men and women of every class to receive a complete education of the faculties God gave them, and then the present institutions and opinions of society on this matter of education are all wrong, contrary to reason and the law of God. There are some good men, and religious men, doubtless, who think that in this respect matters can never be much mended, that the senses must always overlay the soul, the strong crush the weak, and the mass of men, who do all the work of the world, must ever be dirty and ignorant, and find little but toil and animal comfort, till they go where the servant is free from his master, and the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. These men represent the despair and the selfishness of society. If the same thing that has been must be; if the future must be just like the past; if falsehood and sin are eternal, and truth and goodness ephemeral creatures of to-day—then these men are right, and the sooner we renounce all hope of liberty, give up all love of wisdom, and call Christianity a lie—a hideous lie—why, the sooner the better. Let us never fear to look things in the face, and call them by their true names. But there are other men, who say the past did its work, and we will do ours. We will not bow to its idols, though they fell from the clouds; nor accept its limitations, though Lycurgus made poor provision, and Numa none at all, for the education of the people; we will not stop at its landmarks, nor construct ourselves in its image, for we also are men. While we take gratefully whatever past times bring us, we will get what we can grasp, and never be satisfied. These men represent the hope and the benevolence there is in man. If they are right, the truths of reason are not a whim; aspiration after perfection is more than a dream; Christianity not a lie, but ​the eternal truth the Allseeing has writ for his children's welfare; God not a tyrant, but the Father of all. The sooner these men are on their feet, and about their work, to reinstate fallen mankind, the better for themselves and the world. They may take counsel of their hopes always, of their fears never.
But there are difficulties in the way of education, as in all ways but that to destruction. There is no panacea to educate the race in a moment, and with no trouble. It is slow work, the old way of each man toiling for himself, with labour and self-denial, and many prayers; the Christian way of the strong helping the weak, thinking for them, and aiding them to think for themselves. Some children can scramble up the mountain alone, but others the parents must carry in their arms. The way is for wise men to think and toil, and toil and think, remembering that “Zeno and Chrysippus did greater things,” says Seneca, “in their studies, than if they had led armies, borne offices, or given laws, which indeed they did, not to one city alone, but to all mankind.” There are great difficulties to be overcome, as M. Pastoret, a French judge, has said, respecting improvements in the law: “We have also to encounter mediocrity, which knows nothing but its old routine; always ready to load with reproaches such as have the courage to raise their thoughts and observations above the level to which itself is condemned. ‘These are innovators,’ it exclaims. ‘This is an innovation,’ say the reproducers of old ideas, with a smile of contempt. Every project of reform is, in their eyes, the result of ignorance or insanity, and the most compassionate it is who condescend to accuse you of what they call the bewilderment of your understanding. ‘They think themselves wiser than their fathers,’ says one, and with that the matter seems decided.” Still the chief obstacle is found in the low, material aims of our countrymen, which make them willing to toil eight, ten, twelve, sixteen, even eighteen hours of the day, for the body, and not one for the mind; in the popular notion, that he who works with the hand can do nothing else. No doubt it is hard work to overcome these difficulties, slow work to get round them. But there are many encouragements for the work: our freedom from war; the abundance of physical comfort in our land; ​the restless activity of the American mind, which requires only right direction; in the facility with which books are printed and circulated; in the free schools, which have already done so vast and beautiful a work; in the free spirit of our institutions, which have hitherto made us victorious everywhere; but, above all, in that religion which was first revealed to a carpenter, earliest accepted by fishermen, most powerfully set forth by a tent-maker—that religion which was the Bethlehem-star of our fathers, their guide and their trust, which has nothing to fear, but everything to hope, from knowledge wide-spread among the people, and which only attains its growth and ripens its fruit when all are instructed—mind, heart and soul. With such encouragement who will venture to despair?