The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1880-04-29
Some Of tho Results Of Universal Edu.
cation.

Some Of tho Results Of Universal Edu-
cation.
Mans life is growing wider in its in.
dividual quality. Few men are any
longer nothing but farmer, or a shop
keeper. or carpenter, or silversmith.
ny gradual accretion, in our land at
least, each individual has become some
thing more than specialist in some
form OF business or industry. The edu-
cation which was once supposed to i'm
ply that the youth with such books in
his hand was designing to be lawyer,
Or clergyman, or q physician, no
longer involves any such conclusion,
for the average youth has become larger
than any mere drudgery, and must be
educated regardless of his form of man
ual or mental labor. The clergyman
once had an easy field of intellectual
labor, in days when he could say what
ever pleased him to an audience that
admired large words and plenty of quo
tations and Obscurity, but educatio nhas
become so universal that the audiences
that assemble in the churches to-day,
from New York to St. Paul or Denver,
are composed of persons with much in.
formation, and with a powerful COM
mon sense. The inventions of our times
have redoubled the demand for mental
culture. A man that cannot read, or
write, or think, can hoe cotton or sugar.
cane, but he cannot be an engineer of a
steam engine, cannot be a conductor of
even freight train, cannot be trusted
as even a switchman. The telegraph
operator must be man or woman of
fair education, and the thousands of
boys who act as messengers in street
and store must be able to read and write
quickly. Thus q hundred new pursuits
have issued new demands for a better
informed mind, and are making bet
ter form of manhood. :. Thus the new
forms of mechanical industry are help
ing expand the mental training and in
formation of the laboreIs, thus making
man greater, not as a laborer, but
as a man. The more invention and
the more complex machinery the
world adopts, the higher will be the
mind that must manage these new i'm
plements. A few simple negroes can
pick cotton balls. but they could not
manage railway train or cylinder
printing press. Theodore Parker once
expressed the wish that blacksmithing
or blowing might become the mere &C.
cident of a man, and not man the acct
dent of the anvil or pillow. The wish is
slowly coming to its qualification, for
the artisans are all becoming reading
and thinking men, and while they beat
the anvil or follow the pillow they are
larger than their work, and have hours
for the separate career of the man. The
ingenuity of an age can not but exert a
reflex influence upon all those who
come within the confines of the age it.
self. To make wider the scope Of each
individual, even the laborer, has come
in later times not only liberty, not only
Christianity, not only the free school to
invite education, but even the recent
inventions have compelled the youth of
the land to seek mental development
as though for some higher art. -.
If we would mark one more illustra-
ton of the assertion that man is becom-
ing larger mind and larger heart, we
can find it in the present condition of
woman. At no one place can we better
see the radical changes for the better
in the life of humanity than at the
standpoint of the modern woman.
When we look into the face of our
mother, or wife, or daughter, or cult
waited friends in this half of the intel
lectual world, we cannot but wonder in
amazement if these are the beings who
have no soul in some lands, and who
c1o -, %ha l.
and who in all the barbarous tribes
have done all the work in field and
house, and who all through the Middle
Ages of Christendom were kind of
miserable appendage to the noble army
of men. Why, even in the Mosaic age,
out of which came Christianity, but
came like morning out of night,
woman could not bring any
kind of lawsuit against a man, and q
man might divorce wife if he would
only take the pains to give her a piece
of writing to that effect. She must
leave the house like servant girl to
whom one may give certificate, not of
good service, but of service. And YOU
remember that in Solomon's magnifi-
cent temple there was an outer court
into which the heather could come. an
inner court into which women could
come, but into the grand interior,
where the wealth and art of the period
had done their best work, and where
God Himself could be found, only the
men were worthy to enter. The first
definition of man was so narrow that
only the King or Royal family were in
cluded in it. By degrees it was en-
larged until many adult men could en-
joy its honors, but little children and
women and slaves were not admitted
into its environs. Infants were slain
readily. Wives were whipped, bought
and sold, divorced at pleasure, or
killed; in some countries, dead slaves
were not buried. There were ravines
or sink-holes into which dead slaves
were thrown. You could find the
places by watching the carrion birds in
their circling flight. Cicero, in the
four or five hundred letters he left
written to friends, mentions often his
father. but never his mother; he d.
vorced two wives, loved his daughter,
inGeed, but was reproved by Roman
statesmen for weeping for her when she
died. Nero killed his mother, and
Seneca, his moral guide, made no COM
plant. 1t thus seems to have taken
the human race long time to expand
the word man to such proportion that
into its nobleness, and security, and
peace the woman and the little child
could take refuge; but at last into this
gigantic ark the weakest and humblest
gather themselves, and are quite safe
as the storms of life come and the
floods climb higher.--Ertract from a
Discourse by Prot. David Ssoing, Chi
cag0.
Hot Cake to an Elephant.
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