The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1882-07-13

humanity. Yet the seat of the Greek church,
Russia = where nine-tenths OF the popula-
ton are illterate, has this very year made the
world shudder at the barbaric crimes commit
ted in that empire upon the brethren of the
founder of Christianity,-the Hebrews-the
most intelligent and thriving subjects of the
temp oralshead of the Greek church.
ireland, fora thousand years one of the most
faithful devotees of the Church of Rome, has
lust completed the entire curriculum of crime
from refusal to pay debts, to murder in the
first degrees, and made both life and property
unsafe within her boroers.
1t is clear then that ignorance and devotion
will not bring on the millenum. Evidently the
problem of what will accomplish the most
complete and efficient prevention of pauperism
ard crime and produce the highest average in
crease of wealth and morality. is not yet solv-
ed. Its solution is difficult. One of the best
teachers Eand most scholarly gentlemen that
in half century has had the good fortune to
preside over this academy-Moses Soule-often
encouraged his pupils by quoting to them from
Terence the lines:
MI tam di1fcEe est
QuiG qtdrelado sRUesttgdTip0eS9
Nothing is so difficult but that by study it
may be solved.
This is true in social sproblems as in those
from mathematics The importance of the
question is ever pressing upon u.s. For the
support of paupers and criminals and the pro-
lection of society against tue latter impose Q
burden upon society second only to that OF
war
In New York City for example, this burden
including necessarily police, criminal courts,
reformatores, jails, penitentiarIes, asylums,
almshouses aud poor outside of public insti-
tutions, amounts to over six millonssof dollars
year; and that city contains only one-fortieth
of che population of the United States
propose to speak of the relations of educa-
ton to wealth and pauperism, and to morality
| and crime; and, what kind of training is the
surest aud best safeguard against the two great
social evils of pauperism and crime; and where
this training is TO be obtained.
First, The Relation of Education to Wealth
| and Pauperism.
As civilization advances the apparatus ana
machines of every day life are becoming more
and more complicated, and existence more and
more expensive on account of the constantly
increasing and multiplying wants OF humans
ty. To-day even the rudest and simplest occu-
pation-farming-is carried on chiefly BY ma
chinery. A farm laborer of a hundred years
ago, if suddenly dropped down upon modern
farm on a western prairie, could scarcely un-
derstand anything that is going on.
Even the plows, the harrows the cultiyators,
the drillers, the sowers the hoeing machines,
the mowers, the reapers, the headers, the
threshers the winnowers, the very wag-
ons and carts, and harnesses. would each and
all be a mystery to him; to say nothing of the
more complicated machinery and the scientific
processes required to convert the raw products
of the field into food, clothing and shelter. The
method of preserving and utilizing and mar
keting the products to advantage, all require
| knowledge.
II this is true of farming it is still more true
4 of every other department of human industry.
La the days of Homer and Perices. Virgil
Augustus, Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth,
cotton, and wool, and fax, and silk, were all
spun and woven by hand, and sewed up by
hand! Now single machine tended by one
skilled workman, does the spinning that form
| erly required hundreds of busy hands and nim-
| BILE fingers; another tended by single work.
man does the weaving that once demanded
three or four hundred human beings; third
will cut out forty or fifty garments at a time
and do it quicker than one can be cut by hand.
| A line of sewing machines run by steam or
electricity will each do the work of twenty
| sewing girls and do it better. This state of sc
ciety makes it difficult for an ignorantsl laborer
to find place to work at all and when found
he can scarcely earn enough in competition
with the skilled to keep soul and body togeth-
er. He finds himself on every hand rejected or
thrown out of employment because of his ig-
norance, unskillfulness, incompetency and in
ability to do things in the modern way.
The net results of his rade industry compare
with those of his skilled competitor in the
same ratio that the quantity of grain trans
ported to market by the ignorant peasant OF
the lastcentury, on the back of his mule, in
one end of bag and balanced BY q stone OF
equal weight in the other, so as not TO slide
off, compares with the amount transported by
the intelligent farmer who puts whole crop
into freight car and makes coal and water roll
| it over a railroad track hundreds of miles in a
single day. Thirty years ago saw the Nea-
politan peasants carrying their small hand
made, bottle-shaped cheeses, in strings OF two
or three dozen, on their backs, from the valley
| of the Apprentices to the market in their beau
tiful city by the sea. Three summers since,
| while standing on the snowy crest of Pixies
Peak. in the Rocky Mountains, 4,4Co feet
high, a railway train in the valley below, but
~, e,,tl xiou r71fTa dnpr he oOr nf q
cheese ranch, the property OF son OF New
England. It halted at the door of his cheese
factory, was soon larded with the whole sum-
mers product of his dairy, sand then steamed
away twenty-five hundred miles ID New York.
where in a few days, it delivered in perfect
condition, its tons of rich yellow freight,
cheaper per pound than the Italian peasant
was able to carry his hundredth part of the
distance. But the selection of the herds of
COWS for this Colorado ranch, their care and
management, the milking machines, the scien-
tifc processes of cooling and curdling the milk
and the preparation-pressing, preserving and
boxing the cheeses and their shipment,-all
require knowledge. Can we determine how
much this knowledge adds to the value of hu-
man labor
In the year 1870 the Commission
er of Education at Washington sent
out series of carefully drawn, compre-
hensive and searching questions to the great
centres of labor in all parts of the United
States. These centres were SO selected as to
represent every kind of labor, from the rudest
and Simplest up to the most skilled. The OBJ.
ject of the questions was to determine the real
produotiveness of ltegats and Iliterate Labor.
When answers came back they were tabu-
lated reduced and generalizsd, SO as to get at
the average result over the whole country.
This inyestigation-one of the most interesting
ever made-Drought clearly to light the follow
ing facts
THAT an average free common school edu-
cation, such as is provided in all the states
where the free common school has become a
permanent institution, adds so per cent. to the
productive power of the laborer considered as a
mere machine of production.
| 2-That the average academical education
adds 1C0 per cent.
3--Tbat the average collegiate or university
education adds from 2C0 to 300 per cent. OF his
average annual productive capacity, to say
nothing of the vast increase to his mahliness-
to his God likeness.
By the census of 1880 we had in the United
States lour million illiterate adults-white and
colored Now putting their labor at the mini
mum, an annual value of one hundred dollars
each-which is far below the average-and the
annual less to these persons from the lack o1
at least a common-school education-would be
fifty dollars each. This for the whole number
of four million is twenty millions of dollars
per year, a sum twice as large as the entire an
nual expenditure for public education in the
whole country. This sum-two hundred
millions of dollars-is a clear annual loss te
GneS6 Itineraries anu 10 tu0 Dy fea
son OF their illiterscy. A State filed with
ignorant citizens is like a farm of pine barrens
its crop is scarcely worth harvesting. Poverty
clings to the illiterate closer than a brother
Like the tabled spirit of Nessus this kind Of
poverty prisons and disables whomsoever il
covers. A majority Of these four millions Of
| iliterate adults were in the late slave States
and their effect ON the production and preser
vation of wealth there is shown by the las
census. In ten of these States notwlthstand
ing their rich soil and mild climate the asses
sed value of property in the ten years from
1870 to 1880 decreased 20 per cent while in the
State of Maine, with its universal education
notwithstanding its thin, poor, ,ssoil and colo
climate, its wealth in the same period in
creased fifteen per cent, and the State of New
: Hampshire eleven per cent.
The late Slave States complain of their lea
bilty to pay the expenses of free common
schools, and they raised for public education il
1880 only ten million eight hundred and eight,
three thousand one hundred and four dollar
QO883 104). The amount of the annual loss
from their lliterate labor would-had the,
been educated IS in Maine and New Hamp
: shire-establsh and support free common
schools nine months in the year for every chile
of school age within their borders, anC
have a surplus sufficient to support free acad
emy in every county, and free college in eve
ry State. Education is the key to wealth.
The relative position of the literate and ilIit