Clarksville weekly chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1873-1890, 1873-03-01
THE FUTURE.

what benefits to the South, are its ge-
NAL cline, its timber and its soil, its
productions and its mines of mineral
wealth, its water power, its harbors
and its navigable streams, its higher
standard of morality and its chivalrous
spirit, SO long as corruption poisons
its moral atmosphere and oppression
brushes its spirit and energy? What
benefit does it derive from a federal
Union and written compact, when
that compact is set aside by sectional
tyranny and that Union is enforced for
mercenary considerations and ignored
for purposes OF expressions?
The future Of the North as well as
of the South, is question of good. or
bad government, and in neither Sec
ton, can the former be secured except
through the instrumentality of educa-
ton and good morals and by the term
education we do not mean to imply
that intellectual cultivation necessari-
ly engenders moral purity, because
piety and morals are things separate
and apart, and superior to scholastic
learning. Still, we do not underate the
power of knowledge as an invaluable
ally of morals in the erection and
maintenance of good government. IF
intellectual improvement were insep-
arabic from good morals, how does it
happen that the people of the North,
Boosting of their intellectual culture
and haunting the South with its ignor-
ance, are confessedly, the most corrupt
on earth and the higher the culture,
the more corrupt?
Ignorance and morality are far from
being incompatible. We admit that
ignorance, in conjunction with poverty,
is more liable to become immoral be-
cause poverty often forces associations
that are wholly evil, and sets up ex-
amples that are contagious because
they appeal to passion and the preju-
dices of caste. The sources of cor
ruption agsinst which the people of
the South have to guard themselves,
are the poverty to which aggressive
tyranny has reduced them, the exam
pie set them by a foully corrupt gov
eminent and association with its vile
agents and the grossly ignorantand cor
rupt citizens turned loose among them.
1t is true that repulsion rather than
imitation should be the natural con-
sequence of such examples and associ-
ations, but human nature is weak, and
the influence of use and habit is as
powerful as insidious. The guarran-
tees to the South, against the infuen-
ces of a corrupt northern government
and its northern supporters, are educa
ton and morality-by which term we
mean the cultivation ofboth the moral
and intellectual faculties of the rising
generation.
Lord Bacon and other learned phil
osophers have declared that at from six
to ten years of age, the moral charac
teristics of the child are fixed and to
be developed or modified in after life
by the character of the circumstances
to which they may be subjected. If
this hypothesis. be true, what wide
field for reflection does it open up TO
parents How stern the duty it impo-
ses. to see that none but germs of
good be grated upon the plastic mind
of youth! How strong the appeal to
to make happy home the refuge of
their children from the communicating
influences of vicious examples and as
sociations The generation of men
whose privilege it may be to give to
the South prosperity and happiness,
power and glory, may now be playing
around their mothers knees, silently
praying them to bestow pure moral
culture as necessity, and mental cul-
ture both as an accomplishment and
as a means of power in their future
conflicts with the temptations of after
life. Shall their prayers be in vain?
The mother, too poor to bestow
scholastic education, is rich enough
to inculcate lessons of pure morality,
BY precept and example, that will
make her sons powerful instruments in
the work of maintaining free govern
ment. These lessons are few-truth,
justice, integrity and honor; but, be
not led into the, too common error,
that they are necessary results OF men
tai culture-they are mutually sustain
ing though by no means dependent,
for their existence the one upon the
other. We, every day, see examples
of honest poverty and dishonest
wealth, of moral ignorance and cor
rupt learning. Let us keep the two
ideas distinct and learn from them
that, if too poor to give our children
the advantages of school education, we
are rich enough to impart those moral
lessons which will enable them to IL
lustrate the moral axiom, that IAN
honest man is the noblest work Of
God" This is the process by which
the South is to be regenerated and the
Government restored to its original
purity and the way opened for future
of greatness and glory that it never |
approached in its palmiest days.
GRANTS house, near St. Louis, has
been burned, but Congress is about to |