Part 4 (1/2)

Donations in an age of great munificence, and horror of far-off or unattractive sins, like the slaveholding of Southerners and the intemperance of the miserable poor, are not, and ought not to be, accepted as signs of inward and spiritual grace, and of readiness to scale ”the toppling crags of duty.”

The conversion of the working-cla.s.ses, too, it is safe to say, will never be accomplished by any ecclesiastical organization which sells cus.h.i.+oned pews at auction, or rents them at high rates, and builds million-dollar churches for the accommodation of one thousand wors.h.i.+ppers. The pa.s.sion for equality has taken too strong hold of the workingman to make it possible to catch him with cheap chapels and a.s.sistant pastors. He will not seek salvation _in forma pauperis_, and thinks the best talent in the ministerial market not a whit too good for him. He not unnaturally doubts the sincerity of Christians who are not willing to kneel beside badly dressed persons in prayer on the one day of the week when prayer is public. In fact, to fit the Protestant Church in this country to lay hold of the laboring population a great process of reconstruction would be necessary. The congregational system would have to be abandoned or greatly modified, the common fund made larger and administered in a different way. There would have, in short, to be a close approach to the Roman Catholic organization, and the churches would have to lose the character of social clubs, which now makes them so comfortable and attractive. Well-to-do Christians would have to sacrifice their tastes in a dozen ways, and give up the expectation of aesthetic pleasure in public wors.h.i.+p. There cannot be a vast Gothic cathedral for the mult.i.tude in every city. The practice of the church would have to be forced up to its own theory of its character and mission, which would involve serious collision with some of the most deeply rooted habits and ideas of modern social and political life. That there is any immediate probability of this we do not believe. Until it is brought about, its members must make up their minds to have religious professions treated by some as but slight guarantees of character, and by others as but cloaks of wrong-doing, hard as this may be for that large majority to whom they are an honest expression of sure hopes and n.o.ble aims.

RoLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS

Mr. Galton, in his work on ”Hereditary Genius,” has drawn attention in a striking chapter to the effect which the systematic destruction and expatriation, by the Inquisition or the religious intolerance of the government, of the leading men of the nation--its boldest thinkers, most ardent investigators, most prudent and careful and ingenious workers, in generation after generation--had in bringing about the moral and political decline of the three great Latin countries, France, Spain, and Italy--a decline of which, in the case of the two former at least, we have probably not seen the end. The persons killed or banished amounted only to a few thousands every year, but they were--no matter from what rank they came--the flower of the population: the men whose labor and whose influence enabled the State to keep its place in the march of civilization. The picture is very valuable (particularly just now, when there is so great a disposition to revel in the consciousness of vast numbers), as calling attention to the smallness of the area within which, after all, the sources of national greatness and progress are to be sought. The mind which keeps the ma.s.s in motion, which saves and glorifies it, would most probably, if we could lay bare the secret of national life, be found in the possession of a very small proportion of the people, though not in any cla.s.s in particular-- neither among the rich nor the poor, the learned nor simple, capitalists nor laborers; but the abstraction of these few from the sum of national existence, though it would hardly be noticed in the census, would produce a fatal languor, were the nation not constantly receiving fresh blood from other countries.

This element was singled out with considerable accuracy in France and Spain by religious persecution. It would happily be impossible to devise any process of selection one-quarter as efficient in our age or in this country. The one we have been using for the last twenty years, and on which a good deal of popular reliance has been placed, is the acc.u.mulation of wealth; and under this ”the self-made man”--that is, the man who, starting in life ignorant and poor, has made a large fortune, and got control of a great many railroads and mines and factories--has risen into the front rank of eminence. The events of the last five years, however, have had a damaging effect on his reputation, and he now stands as low as his worst enemies could desire. As he declines, the man of some kind of training naturally rises; and it would be running no great risk to affirm that the popular mind inclines more than it has usually done to the belief that trained men--that is, men who have been prepared for their work by teaching on approved methods--are after all the most valuable possession a country can have, and that a country is well or ill off in proportion as they are numerous or the reverse. One does not need to travel very far from this position to reach the conclusion that there is probably no way in which we could strike so deadly a blow at the happiness and progress of the United States as by sweeping away, by some process of proscription kept up during a few generations, the graduates of the princ.i.p.al colleges. In no other way could we make so great a drain on the reserved force of character, ambition, and mental culture which const.i.tutes so large a portion of the national vitality. They would not be missed at the polls, it is true, and if they were to run a candidate for the Presidency to-morrow their vote would excite great merriment among the politicians; but if they were got rid of regularly for forty or fifty years in the manner we have suggested, and nothing came in from the outside to supply their places, the politicians would somehow find that they themselves had less public money to vote or steal, less national aspiration to trade upon, less national force to direct, less national dignity to maintain or lose, and that, in fact, by some mysterious process, they were getting to be of no more account in the world than their fellows in Guatemala or Costa Rica.

There will come to the colleges of the United States during the next fifty years a larger and larger number of men who either strongly desire training for themselves or are the sons of men who are deeply sensible of its advantages, and therefore are at the head of families which possess and appreciate the traditions of high civilization, and would like to live in them and contribute their share to perpetuating them--and they will not come from any one portion of the country. There are, unhappily, ”universities” in all parts of the Union, but there is hardly a doubt that as the means of communication are improved and cheapened, and as the real nature and value of the university education become better understood, the tendency to use the small local inst.i.tutions pa.s.sing by this name as, what they really are, high schools, and resort to the half-dozen colleges which can honestly call themselves universities, will increase. The demands which modern culture, owing to the advance of science and research in every field, now makes on a university, in the shape of professors, books, apparatus, are so great that only the largest and wealthiest inst.i.tutions can pretend to meet them, and in fact there is something very like false pretence in the promise to do so held out to poor students by many of the smaller colleges. These colleges doubtless do a certain amount of work very creditably; but they are uncandid in saying that they give a university education, and in issuing diplomas purporting to be certificates that any such education has either been sought or received. The idea of maintaining a university for the sake of the local glory of it is a form of folly which ought not to be a.s.sociated with education in any stage. These considerations are now felt to be so powerful in other countries that they threaten the destruction of a whole batch of universities in Italy which have come down famous and honored from the Middle Ages and have sent out twenty generations of students, and they are causing even the very best of the smaller universities in Germany, great and efficient as many of them are, to tremble for their existence.

There is no interest of learning, therefore, which would not be served by the greater concentration of the resources of the country as regards university education, still less is there any interest of society or politics. It is of the last importance that the cla.s.s of men from all parts of the country whom the universities send out into the world should as far as possible be educated together, and start on their careers with a common stock of traditions, tastes, and a.s.sociations. Much as steam and the telegraph have done, and will do, to diminish for administrative purposes the size of the Republic, and to simplify the work of government, they cannot prevent the creation of a certain diversity of interests, and even of temperament and manners, through differences of climate and soil and productions. There will never come a time when we shall not have more or less of such folly as the notion that the South and West need more money than the East, because they have less capital, or the struggle of some parts of the country for a close market against other parts which seek an open one. Nothing but a reign of knowledge and wisdom, such as centuries will not bring, will prevent States on the Gulf or on the Pacific from fancying that their interests are not identical with those of the Northern Atlantic, and nothing but profound modifications in the human const.i.tution will ever bring the California wheat-raiser into complete sympathy with the New England shoemaker.

The work of our political system for ages to come will consist largely in keeping these differences in check; and in doing it, it will need all the help it can get from social and educational influences. It ought to be the aim, therefore, of the larger inst.i.tutions of learning to offer every inducement in their power to students from all parts of the Union, and more especially from the South, as the region which is most seriously threatened by barbarism, and in which the sense of national unity and the hold of national traditions on the popular mind are now feeblest. We at the North owe to the civilized men at the South who are now, no matter what their past faults or delusions may have been, struggling to save a large portion of the Union from descent into heathen darkness and disorder, the utmost help and consideration. We owe them above all a free and generous welcome to a share in whatever means of culture we have at our disposal, and ought to offer it, as far as is consistent with our self-respect, in a shape that will not wound theirs.

The question of the manner of doing this came up incidentally at Harvard the other day, at the dedication of the great hall erected in memory of the graduates of the university who died in the war.

The hall is to be used for general college purposes, for examinations, and some of the ceremonial of commencement, as well as for dinner, and a portion of the walls is covered with tablets bearing the names of those to whose memory it is dedicated. The question whether the building would keep alive the remembrance of the civil war in any way in which it is inexpedient to keep it alive, or in any way which would tend to keep Southern students away from the university, has been often asked, and by some answered in the affirmative. General Devens, who presided at the alumni dinner, gave full and sufficient answer to those who find fault with the rendering of honor on the Northern side to those who fell in its cause; but General Bartlett--who perhaps more than any man living is qualified to speak for those who died in the war--uttered, in a burst of unpremeditated eloquence, at the close of the proceedings, the real reason why no Southern man need, and we hope will never, feel hurt by Northern memorials of the valor and constancy of Northern soldiers. It is not altogether the cause which enn.o.bles fighting; it is the spirit in which men fight; and no horror of the objects of the Southern insurrection need prevent anybody from admiring or lamenting the gallant men who honestly, loyally, and from a sense of duty perished in its service. It is not given to the wisest and best man to choose the right side; but the simplest and humblest knows whether it is his conscience which bids him lay down his life. And this test may be applied by each side to all the victims of the late conflict without diminis.h.i.+ng by one particle its faith in the justice of its own cause. Moreover, as General Bartlett suggested, the view of the nature of the struggle which is sure to gain ground all over the country as the years roll on is that it was a fierce and pa.s.sionate but inevitable attempt to settle at any cost a controversy which could be settled in no other way; and that all who shared in it, victors or vanquished, helped to save the country and establish its government on sure and lasting foundations. This feeling cannot grow without bringing forcibly to mind the fact that the country was saved through the war that virtue might increase, that freedom might spread and endure, and that knowledge might rule, and not that politicians might have a treasury to plunder and marble halls to exchange their vituperation in; thus uniting the best elements of Northern and Southern society by the bonds of honest indignation as well as of n.o.ble hopes.

THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The _Baltimore American_, discussing the plan of the Hopkins University in that city, says: ”The _Nation_ suggests to the Board of Trustees a university that would leave Latin, Greek, mathematics, and the elements of natural science out of its curriculum.” This is so great a mistake that we are at a loss to understand how it could have been made. The _Nation_ has never suggested anything of the kind. The university which the _Nation_ has expressed the hope the trustees would found is simply a university with such a high standard for admission on all subjects that the professors would be saved the necessity of teaching the rudiments of either Latin, Greek, mathematics, or natural science; or, in other words, that the country would be saved considerable waste of skilled labor. The reason why we have ventured to expect this of the Hopkins trustees is that they enjoy the all but unprecedented advantage of being left in possession of a very large bequest, with complete liberty, within very wide limits, as to the disposition of it. In other words, they are to found a university with it, but as to the kind of university they may exercise their discretion.

That this is a very exceptional position everybody familiar with the history of American colleges knows. All the older colleges are bound to the state, or to certain religious denominations, by laws or usages or precedents which impose a certain tolerably fixed character either on the subjects or on the mode of teaching them, or on both. They have traditions to uphold, or denominational interests to care for, or political prejudices to satisfy. The newer ones, on the other hand, are apt to have incurred a bondage even worse still, in having to carry out the wishes of a founder who, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, had only a faint notion of the nature and needs of a university, and in endowing one sought rather to erect a monument to his memory than to found a seat of learning. In so far as he was interested in the curriculum, he probably desired that it should be such as would satisfy some want which he himself felt, or thought he felt, in early life, or should diffuse some social or religious or political crotchet on which his fancy had secretly fed during his years of active exertion, and on the success of which he came to think, in the latter part of his life, that the best interests of the community were dependent. The number of these honorably ambitious but ill-informed and somewhat eccentric testators increases every year, as the country grows in wealth and the habit of giving to public objects gains in strength.

The consequence is that we are threatened with the spectacle during the coming century of a great waste of money by well-meaning persons in the establishment all over the country of inst.i.tutions calling themselves ”universities,” which are either so feebly equipped as rather to hinder than help the cause of education, or so completely committed by their organization to the propagation of certain social or religious theories as to deserve the appellation of mission stations rather than of colleges. Education is now an art of exceeding delicacy and complexity. To master it, so as to have a trustworthy opinion as to the relative value of studies and as to the best mode of pursuing them, and as to the organization of inst.i.tutions devoted to the work of instruction, a man needs both learning and experience. The giving him money to employ in his special work, therefore, without leaving him discretion as to the manner in which he shall use it, is to prepare almost certainly for its waste in more than one direction. To make the most of the resources of the country for educational purposes, it is necessary above all things that they should be placed at the disposal of those who have made education a special study, and who are free, as we understand the Hopkins trustees to be, from any special bias or bond, and are ready or willing to look at the subject from every side.

Their liberty, of course, brings with it great responsibility--all the greater for the reasons we have been enumerating.

Now, as to the use which they should make of this liberty, the _Baltimore American_ fears that if they found a university of the cla.s.s sketched by us some weeks ago, ”the people of Maryland would be greatly disappointed--there would not be over fifty students,”

and ”there would be a great outcry against the investment of three and a half millions of dollars for the benefit of so small a number.” Whether the people of Maryland will be disappointed or not, depends on the amount of consideration they give the matter. If they are satisfied that the foundation of such a university as is now talked of is the best use that can be made of the money, they will not be disappointed, and there will be no ”outcry” at all. Being an intelligent people, they will on reflection see that the value of a university by no means depends solely on the proportion borne by the number of its students to the amount of its revenues, because, judged in this way--that is, as instruments of direct popular benefit--all the universities in the country might be p.r.o.nounced failures. The bulk of the community derives no direct benefit from them at all. Harvard, for instance, has an endowment of about five million dollars, we believe, and the total number of the students is only 1,200, while the population of the State of Ma.s.sachusetts is 1,500,000, so that, even supposing all the students to come from Ma.s.sachusetts, which they do not, less than one person in every thousand profits by the university.

The same story might be told of Yale or any other college.

Considered as what are called popular inst.i.tutions--that is, inst.i.tutions from which everybody can or does derive some calculable, palpable benefit--the universities of this and every other country are useless, and there ought on this theory to be a prodigious ”outcry” against them, and they ought, on the principle of equality, if allowed to exist at all, to be allowed to exist only on condition that they will give a degree, or at least offer an education, to every male citizen of sound mind. But n.o.body takes this view of them. The poorest and most ignorant hod-carrier would not hold, if asked, that because he cannot go to college there ought to be no colleges. Sensible people in every country acknowledge that a high education can in the nature of things be only obtained by a very small proportion of the population; but that the few who seek it, and can afford to take it, should get it, and should get it of the best quality, they hold to be a public benefit. Now, why a public benefit? The service that Harvard or Yale renders to the community certainly does not lie simply in the fact that it qualifies a thousand young men every year to earn a livelihood. They would earn a livelihood whether they went to college or not. The vast majority of men earn a livelihood without going to college or thinking of it. Indeed, it is doubted by many persons, and with much show of reason, whether a man does not earn it all the more readily for not going to college at all; and as regards the work of the world of all kinds, the great bulk of it is done, and well done, by persons who have not received a university education and do not regret it. So that the benefits which the country derives from the universities consists mainly in the refining and elevating influences which they create, in the taste for study and research which they diffuse, in the social and political ideals which they frame and hold up for admiration, in the confidence in the power of knowledge which they indirectly spread among the people, and in the small though steady contributions they make to that reverence for ”things not seen” in which the soul of the state may be said to lie, and without which it is nothing better than a factory or an insurance company.

There is nothing novel about the considerations we are here urging.

The problem over which university reformers have been laboring in every country during the past forty years has been, how to rid the universities, properly so called, of the care of the feeble, inefficient, and poorly prepared students, and reserve their teaching for the better-fitted, older, and more matured; or, in other words, how, in the interest both of economy and culture, to reserve the highest teaching power of the community for the most promising material. It is forty years since John Stuart Mill wrote a celebrated attack on the English universities, then in a very low condition, in which he laid it down broadly that the end above all for which endowed universities ought to exist was ”to keep alive philosophy,” leaving ”the education of common minds for the common business of life” for the most part to private enterprise. This seemed at the time exacting too much, and it doubtless seems so still; but it is nevertheless true that ever since that period universities of the highest cla.s.s, both in Europe and in this country, have been working in that direction--striving, that is to say, either to sift the applicants for admission, by imposing increasingly severe tests, and thus presenting to the professors only pupils of the highest grade to work upon; or, at all events, if not repelling the ill-fitted, expending all their strength in furnis.h.i.+ng the highest educational advantages to the well-fitted. In the last century, Harvard and Yale were doing just the kind of work that the high schools now do--that is, taking young lads and teaching them the elements of literature. At the present day they are throwing this work as far as possible on the primary schools, and reserving their professors and libraries and apparatus, as far as the state of the country and the conditions of their organization will permit, for those older and more advanced students who bring to the work of learning both real ardor and real preparation. A boy has to know more to get into either of them to-day than his grandfather knew when he graduated. Nevertheless, with all the efforts they can make after this true economy of power and resources, there is in both of them a large amount of waste of labor. There are men in both of them, and in various other colleges, much of whose work is almost as much a misuse of energy and time as if they were employed so many hours a day in carrying hods of mortar, simply because they are doing what the masters of primary schools ought to do, and what no man at a university ought to be asked to do. It is a kind of work, too, which, if it have to be done in colleges at all, is already abundantly provided for by endowment. No Maryland youth who desires to learn a little mathematics, get a smattering of cla.s.sics, and some faint notions of natural science, or even to support himself by manual labor while doing this, will suffer if the Hopkins endowment is used for higher work. The country swarms already with inst.i.tutions which meet his needs, and in which he can graduate with ease to himself and credit to his State. The trustees of this one will do him and the State and the whole country most service, therefore, by providing a place to which, after he has got hold of the rudiments at some other college, he can come, if he has the right stuff in him, and pursue to the end the studies for which all universities should really be reserved.

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR

I

September 8, 1877.

Having just returned from a few weeks' stay in Virginia it has occurred to me as probable that your readers would be interested in hearing how such changes in Southern manners and tone of thought and economical outlook as could be noted in a brief visit strike one who had travelled in that region before the war had revolutionized it.

It is now twenty years since I spent a winter traversing the Cotton States on horseback, sleeping at the house which happened to be nearest when the night caught me. Buchanan had just been elected; the friends of slavery, though anxious, were exultant and defiant, and the possibility of a separate political future had begun to take definite shape in the public mind, at least in the Gulf States. I am unable to compare the economical condition of that part of the country at that time with its condition to-day, because both slavery and agriculture in Virginia differed then in many important respects from slavery and agriculture farther south. But the habits and modes of thought and feeling bred by slavery were essentially the same all over the South; and I do not think that I shall go far astray in a.s.suming that the changes in these which I have noticed in Virginia would be found to-day in all the other States.

The first which struck me, and it was a most agreeable one, was what I may call the emanc.i.p.ation which conversation and social intercourse with Northerners had undergone. In 1857 the tone of nearly everybody with whom I came in contact, however veiled by politeness, was in some degree irritable and defiant. My host and I were never long before the evening fire without my finding that he was impatient to talk about slavery, that he suspected me of disliking it, and yet that he wished to have me understand that he did not care, and that n.o.body at the South cared two cents what I thought about it, and that it was a little impertinent in me, who knew so little of the negro, to have any opinion about it at all. I was obliged, too, to confess inwardly that there was a good deal of justification for his bad temper. There was I, a curious stranger, roving through his country and eating at his board, and all the while secretly or openly criticising or condemning his relations with his laborers and servants, and, in fact, the whole scheme of his domestic life. I was not a pleasant companion, and nothing could make me one, and no matter on what themes our talk ran, it was colored by our opinions on the inst.i.tution. He looked at nearly everything in politics and society from what might be called the slaveholder's point of view, and suspected me, on the other hand, of disguising reprobation of the South and its inst.i.tutions in any praise of the North or of France or England which I might utter. So that there was a certain acridity and a sense of strong and deep limitations and reserves in our discussions, somewhat like those which are felt in the talk of a pious evangelical Protestant with a pious Catholic.