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Title: Diversities of American Life
Author: Charles Dudley Warner
Release Date: March, 2002 [Etext #3111]
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Diversities of American Life
by Charles Dudley Warner
This is a very interesting age. Within the memory of men not yet come to
middle life the time of the trotting horse has been reduced from two
minutes forty seconds to two minutes eight and a quarter seconds. During
the past fifteen years a universal and wholesome pastime of boys has been
developed into a great national industry, thoroughly organized and almost
altogether relegated to professional hands, no longer the exercise of the
million but a spectacle for the million, and a game which rivals the
Stock Exchange as a means of winning money on the difference of opinion
as to the skill of contending operators.
The newspapers of the country--pretty accurate and sad indicators of the
popular taste--devote more daily columns in a week's time to chronicling
the news about base-ball than to any other topic that interests the
American mind, and the most skillful player, the pitcher, often college
bred, whose entire prowess is devoted to not doing what he seems to be
doing, and who has become the hero of the American girl as the Olympian
wrestler was of the Greek maiden and as the matador is of the Spanish
senorita, receives a larger salary for a few hours' exertion each week
than any college president is paid for a year's intellectual toil. Such
has been the progress in the interest in education during this period
that the larger bulk of the news, and that most looked for, printed about
the colleges and universities, is that relating to the training, the
prospects and achievements of the boat crews and the teams of base-ball
and foot-ball, and the victory of any crew or team is a better means of
attracting students to its college, a better advertisement, than success
in any scholastic contest. A few years ago a tournament was organized in
the North between several colleges for competition in oratory and
scholarship; it had a couple of contests and then died of inanition and
want of public interest.
During the period I am speaking of there has been an enormous advance in
technical education, resulting in the establishment of splendid special
schools, essential to the development of our national resources; a growth
of the popular idea that education should be practical,--that is, such an
education as can be immediately applied to earning a living and acquiring
wealth speedily,--and an increasing extension of the elective system in
colleges,--based almost solely on the notion, having in view, of course,
the practical education, that the inclinations of a young man of eighteen
are a better guide as to what is best for his mental development and
equipment for life than all the experience of his predecessors.
In this period, which you will note is more distinguished by the desire
for the accumulation of money than far the general production of wealth,
the standard of a fortune has shifted from a fair competence to that of
millions of money, so that he is no longer rich who has a hundred
thousand dollars, but he only who possesses property valued at many
millions, and the men most widely known the country through, most talked
about, whose doings and sayings are most chronicled in the journals,
whose example is most attractive and stimulating to the minds of youth,
are not the scholars, the scientists, the men of, letters, not even the
orators and statesmen, but those who, by any means, have amassed enormous
fortunes. We judge the future of a generation by its ideals.
Regarding education from the point of view of its equipment of a man to
make money, and enjoy the luxury which money can command, it must be more
and more practical, that is, it must be adapted not even to the higher
aim of increasing the general wealth of the world, by increasing
production and diminishing waste both of labor and capital, but to the
lower aim of getting personal possession of it; so that a striking social
feature of the period is that one-half--that is hardly an overestimate--
one-half of the activity in America of which we speak with so much
enthusiasm, is not directed to the production of wealth, to increasing
its volume, but to getting the money of other people away from them. In
barbarous ages this object was accomplished by violence; it is now
attained by skill and adroitness. We still punish those who gain
property by violence; those who get it by smartness and cleverness, we
try to imitate, and sometimes we reward them with public office.
It appears, therefore, that speed,-the ability to move rapidly from place
to place,--a disproportionate reward of physical over intellectual
science, an intense desire to be rich, which is strong enough to compel
even education to grind in the mill of the Philistines, and an inordinate
elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are
rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand.
They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view,
the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for
opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history
attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the
fear that we are losing the sense of the relative value of things in this
life.
Few persons come to middle life without some conception of these relative
values. It is in the heat and struggle that we fail to appreciate what
in the attainment will be most satisfactory to us. After it is over we
are apt to see that our possessions do not bring the happiness we
expected; or that we have neglected to cultivate the powers and tastes
that can make life enjoyable. We come to know, to use a truism, that a
person's highest satisfaction depends not upon his exterior acquisitions,
but upon what he himself is. There is no escape from this conclusion.
The physical satisfactions are limited and fallacious, the intellectual
and moral satisfactions are unlimited. In the last analysis, a man has
to live with himself, to be his own companion, and in the last resort the
question is, what can he get out of himself. In the end, his life is
worth just what he has become. And I need not say that the mistake
commonly made is as to relative values,--that the things of sense are as
important as the things of the mind. You make that mistake when you
devote your best energies to your possession of material substance, and
neglect the enlargement, the training, the enrichment of the mind. You
make the same mistake in a less degree, when you bend to the popular
ignorance and conceit so far as to direct your college education to
sordid ends. The certain end of yielding to this so-called practical
spirit was expressed by a member of a Northern State legislature who
said, "We don't want colleges, we want workshops." It was expressed in
another way by a representative of the lower house in Washington who
said, "The average ignorance of the country has a right to be represented
here." It is not for me to say whether it is represented there.
Naturally, I say, we ought by the time of middle life to come to a
conception of what sort of things are of most value. By analogy, in the
continual growth of the Republic, we ought to have a perception of what
we have accomplished and acquired, and some clear view of our tendencies.
We take justifiable pride in the glittering figures of our extension of
territory, our numerical growth, in the increase of wealth, and in our
rise to the potential position of almost the first nation in the world.
A more pertinent inquiry is, what sort of people have we become? What
are we intellectually and morally? For after all the man is the thing,
the production of the right sort of men and women is all that gives a
nation value. When I read of the establishment of a great industrial
centre in which twenty thousand people are employed in the increase of
the amount of steel in the world, before I decide whether it would be a
good thing for the Republic to create another industrial city of the same
sort, I want to know what sort of people the twenty thousand are, how
they live, what their morals are, what intellectual life they have, what
their enjoyment of life is, what they talk about and think about, and
what chance they have of getting into any higher life. It does not seem
to me a sufficient gain in this situation that we are immensely
increasing the amount of steel in the world, or that twenty more people
are enabled on account of this to indulge in an unexampled,
unintellectual luxury. We want more steel, no doubt, but haven't we wit
enough to get that and at the same time to increase among the producers
of it the number of men and women whose horizons are extended, who are
companionable, intelligent beings, adding something to the intellectual
and moral force upon which the real progress of the Republic depends?
There is no place where I would choose to speak more plainly of our
national situation today than in the South, and at the University of the
South; in the South, because it is more plainly in a transition state,
and at the University of the South, because it is here and in similar
institutions that the question of the higher or lower plane of life in
the South is to be determined.
To a philosophical observer of the Republic, at the end of the hundred
years, I should say that the important facts are not its industrial
energy, its wealth, or its population, but the stability of the federal
power, and the integrity of the individual States. That is to say, that
stress and trial have welded us into an indestructible nation; and not of
less consequence is the fact that the life of the Union is in the life of
the States. The next most encouraging augury for a great future is the
marvelous diversity among the members of this republican body. If
nothing would be more speedily fatal to our plan of government than
increasing centralization, nothing would be more hopeless in our
development than increasing monotony, the certain end of which is
mediocrity.
Speaking as one whose highest pride it is to be a citizen of a great and
invincible Republic to those whose minds kindle with a like patriotism, I
can say that I am glad there are East and North and South, and West,
Middle, Northwest, and Southwest, with as many diversities of climate,
temperament, habits, idiosyncrasies, genius, as these names imply. Thank
Heaven we are not all alike; and so long as we have a common purpose in
the Union, and mutual toleration, respect, and sympathy, the greater will
be our achievement and the nobler our total development, if every section
is true to the evolution of its local traits. The superficial foreign
observer finds sameness in our different States, tiresome family likeness
in our cities, hideous monotony in our villages, and a certain common
atmosphere of life, which increasing facility of communication tends to
increase. This is a view from a railway train. But as soon as you
observe closely, you find in each city a peculiar physiognomy, and a
peculiar spirit remarkable considering the freedom of movement and
intercourse, and you find the organized action of each State sui generis
to a degree surprising considering the general similarity of our laws and
institutions. In each section differences of speech, of habits of
thought, of temperament prevail. Massachusetts is unlike Louisiana,
Florida unlike Tennessee, Georgia is unlike California, Pennsylvania is
unlike Minnesota, and so on, and the unlikeness is not alone or chiefly
in physical features. By the different style of living I can tell when I
cross the line between Connecticut and New York as certainly as when I
cross the line between Vermont and Canada. The Virginian expanded in
Kentucky is not the same man he was at home, and the New England Yankee
let loose in the West takes on proportions that would astonish his
grandfather. Everywhere there is a variety in local sentiment, action,
and development. Sit down in the seats of the State governments and
study the methods of treatment of essentially the common institutions of
government, of charity and discipline, and you will be impressed with the
variety of local spirit and performance in the Union. And this,
diversity is so important, this contribution of diverse elements is so
necessary to the complex strength and prosperity of the whole, that one
must view with alarm all federal interference and tendency to greater
centralization.
And not less to be dreaded than monotony from the governmental point of
view, is the obliteration of variety in social life and in literary
development. It is not enough for a nation to be great and strong, it
must be interesting, and interesting it cannot be without cultivation of
local variety. Better obtrusive peculiarities than universal sameness.
It is out of variety as well as complexity in American life, and not in
homogeneity and imitation, that we are to expect a civilization
noteworthy in the progress of the human race.
Let us come a little closer to our subject in details. For a hundred
years the South was developed on its own lines, with astonishingly little
exterior bias. This comparative isolation was due partly to the
institution of slavery, partly to devotion to the production of two or
three great staples. While its commercial connection with the North was
intimate and vital, its literary relation with the North was slight.
With few exceptions Northern authors were not read in the South, and the
literary movement of its neighbors, such as it was, from 1820 to 1860,
scarcely affected it. With the exception of Louisiana, which was
absolutely ignorant of American literature and drew its inspiration and
assumed its critical point of view almost wholly from the French, the
South was English, but mainly English of the time of Walter Scott and
George the Third. While Scott was read at the North for his knowledge of
human nature, as he always will be read, the chivalric age which moves in
his pages was taken more seriously at the South, as if it were of
continuing importance in life. In any of its rich private libraries you
find yourself in the age of Pope and Dryden, and the classics were
pursued in the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge in the time of Johnson. It
was little disturbed by the intellectual and ethical agitation of modern
England or of modern New England. During this period, while the South
excelled in the production of statesmen, orators, trained politicians,
great judges, and brilliant lawyers, it produced almost no literature,
that is, no indigenous literature, except a few poems and--a few humorous
character-sketches; its general writing was ornately classic, and its
fiction romantic on the lines of the foreign romances.
From this isolation one thing was developed, and another thing might in
due time be expected. The thing developed was a social life, in the
favored class, which has an almost unique charm, a power of being
agreeable, a sympathetic cordiality, an impulsive warmth, a frankness in
the expression of emotion, and that delightful quality of manner which
puts the world at ease and makes life pleasant. The Southerners are no
more sincere than the Northerners, but they have less reserve, and in the
social traits that charm all who come in contact with them, they have an
element of immense value in the variety of American life.
The thing that might have been expected in due time, and when the call
came--and it is curious to note that the call and cause of any
renaissance are always from the outside--was a literary expression fresh
and indigenous. This expectation, in a brief period since the war, has
been realized by a remarkable performance and is now stimulated by a
remarkable promise. The acclaim with which the Southern literature has
been received is partly due to its novelty, the new life it exhibited,
but more to the recognition in it of a fresh flavor, a literary quality
distinctly original and of permanent importance. This production, the
first fruits of which are so engaging in quality, cannot grow and broaden
into a stable, varied literature without scholarship and hard work, and
without a sympathetic local audience. But the momentary concern is that
it should develop on its own lines and in its own spirit, and not under
the influence of London or Boston or New York. I do not mean by this
that it should continue to attract attention by peculiarities of dialect-
which is only an incidental, temporary phenomenon, that speedily becomes
wearisome, whether "cracker" or negro or Yankee--but by being true to the
essential spirit and temperament of Southern life.
During this period there was at the North, and especially in the East,
great intellectual activity and agitation, and agitation ethical and
moral as well as intellectual. There was awakening, investigation,
questioning, doubt. There was a great deal of froth thrown to the
surface. In the free action of individual thought and expression grew
eccentricities of belief and of practice, and a crop of so-called "isms,"
more or less temporary, unprofitable, and pernicious. Public opinion
attained an astonishing degree of freedom,--I never heard of any
community that was altogether free of its tyranny. At least
extraordinary latitude was permitted in the development of extreme ideas,
new, fantastic, radical, or conservative. For instance, slavery was
attacked and slavery was defended on the same platform, with almost equal
freedom. Indeed, for many years, if there was any exception to the
general toleration it was in the social ostracism of those who held and
expressed extreme opinions in regard to immediate emancipation, and were
stigmatized as abolitionists. There was a general ferment of new ideas,
not always fruitful in the direction taken, but hopeful in view of the
fact that growth and movement are better than stagnation and decay. You
can do something with a ship that has headway; it will drift upon the
rocks if it has not. With much foam and froth, sure to attend agitation,
there was immense vital energy, intense life.
Out of this stir and agitation came the aggressive, conquering spirit
that carried civilization straight across the continent, that built up
cities and States, that developed wealth, and by invention, ingenuity,
and energy performed miracles in the way of the subjugation of nature and
the assimilation of societies. Out of this free agitation sprang a
literary product, great in quantity and to some degree distinguished in
quality, groups of historians, poets, novelists, essayists, biographers,
scientific writers. A conspicuous agency of the period was the lecture
platform, which did something in the spread and popularization of
information, but much more in the stimulation of independent thought and
the awakening of the mind to use its own powers.
Along with this and out of this went on the movement of popular education
and of the high and specialized education. More remarkable than the
achievements of the common schools has been the development of the
colleges, both in the departments of the humanities and of science. If I
were writing of education generally, I might have something to say of the
measurable disappointment of the results of the common schools as at
present conducted, both as to the diffusion of information and as to the
discipline of the mind and the inculcation of ethical principles; which
simply means that they need improvement. But the higher education has
been transformed, and mainly by the application of scientific methods,
and of the philosophic spirit, to the study of history, economics, and
the classics. When we are called to defend the pursuit of metaphysics or
the study of the classics, either as indispensable to the discipline or
to the enlargement of the mind, we are not called on to defend the
methods of a generation ago. The study of Greek is no longer an exercise
in the study of linguistics or the inspection of specimens of an obsolete
literature, but the acquaintance with historic thought, habits, and
polity, with a portion of the continuous history of the human mind, which
has a vital relation to our own life.
However much or little there may be of permanent value in the vast
production of northern literature, judged by continental or even English
standards, the time has came when American scholarship in science, in
language, in occidental or oriental letters, in philosophic and
historical methods, can court comparison with any other. In some
branches of research the peers of our scholars must be sought not in
England but in Germany. So that in one of the best fruits of a period of
intellectual agitation, scholarship, the restless movement has thoroughly
vindicated itself.
I have called your attention to this movement in order to say that it was
neither accidental nor isolated. It was in the historic line, it was fed
and stimulated by all that had gone before, and by all contemporary
activity everywhere. New England, for instance, was alert and
progressive because it kept its doors and windows open. It was
hospitable in its intellectual freedom, both of trial and debate, to new
ideas. It was in touch with the universal movement of humanity and of
human thought and speculation. You lose some quiet by this attitude,
some repose that is pleasant and even desirable perhaps, you entertain
many errors, you may try many useless experiments, but you gain life and
are in the way of better things. New England, whatever else we may say
about it, was in the world. There was no stir of thought, of
investigation, of research, of the recasting of old ideas into new forms
of life, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in England, anywhere, that did
not touch it and to which it did not respond with the sympathy that
common humanity has in the universal progress. It kept this touch not
only in the evolution and expression of thought and emotion which we call
literature (whether original or imitative), but in the application of
philosophic methods to education, in the attempted regeneration of
society and the amelioration of its conditions by schemes of reform and
discipline, relating to the institutions of benevolence and to the
control of the vicious and criminal. With all these efforts go along
always much false sentimentality and pseudo-philanthropy, but little by
little gain is made that could not be made in a state of isolation and
stagnation.
In fact there is one historic stream of human thought, aspiration, and
progress; it is practically continuous, and with all its diversity of
local color and movement it is a unit. If you are in it, you move; if
you are out of it, you are in an eddy. The eddy may have a provincial
current, but it is not in the great stream, and when it has gone round
and round for a century, it is still an eddy, and will not carry you
anywhere in particular. The value of the modern method of teaching and
study is that it teaches the solidarity of human history, the continuance
of human thought, in literature, government, philosophy, the unity of the
divine purpose, and that nothing that has anywhere befallen the human
race is alien to us.
I am not undervaluing the part, the important part, played by
conservatism, the conservatism that holds on to what has been gained if
it is good, that insists on discipline and heed to the plain teaching of
experience, that refuses to go into hysterics of enthusiasm over every
flighty suggestion, or to follow every leader simply because he proposes
something new and strange--I do not mean the conservatism that refuses to
try anything simply because it is new, and prefers to energetic life the
stagnation that inevitably leads to decay. Isolation from the great
historic stream of thought and agitation is stagnation. While this is
true, and always has been true in history, it is also true, in regard to
the beneficent diversity of American life, which is composed of so many
elements and forces, as I have often thought and said, that what has been
called the Southern conservatism in respect to beliefs and certain social
problems, may have a very important part to play in the development of
the life of the Republic.
I shall not be misunderstood here, where the claims of the higher life
are insisted on and the necessity of pure, accurate scholarship is
recognized, in saying that this expectation in regard to the South
depends upon the cultivation and diffusion of the highest scholarship in
all its historic consciousness and critical precision. This sort of
scholarship, of widely apprehending intellectual activity, keeping step
with modern ideas so far as they are historically grounded, is of the
first importance. Everywhere indeed, in our industrial age,--in a
society inclined to materialism, scholarship, pure and simple scholarship
for its own sake, no less in Ohio than in Tennessee, is the thing to be
insisted on. If I may refer to an institution, which used to be midway
between the North and the South, and which I may speak of without
suspicion of bias, an institution where the studies of metaphysics, the
philosophy of history, the classics and pure science are as much insisted
on as the study of applied sciences, the College of New Jersey at
Princeton, the question in regard to a candidate for a professorship or
instructorship, is not whether he was born North or South, whether he
served in one army or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or
a Republican or a Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to, but
is he a scholar and has he a high character? There is no provincialism
in scholarship.
We are not now considering the matter of the agreeableness of one society
or another, whether life is on the whole pleasanter in certain conditions
at the North or at the South, whether there is not a charm sometimes in
isolation and even in provincialism. It is a fair question to ask, what
effect upon individual lives and character is produced by an industrial
and commercial spirit, and by one less restless and more domestic. But
the South is now face to face with certain problems which relate her,
inevitably, to the moving forces of the world. One of these is the
development of her natural resources and the change and diversity of her
industries. On the industrial side there is pressing need of
institutions of technology, of schools of applied science, for the
diffusion of technical information and skill in regard to mining and
manufacturing, and also to agriculture, so that worn-out lands may be
reclaimed and good lands be kept up to the highest point of production.
Neither mines, forests, quarries, water-ways, nor textile fabrics can be
handled to best advantage without scientific knowledge and skilled labor.
The South is everywhere demanding these aids to her industrial
development. But just in the proportion that she gets them, and because
she has them, will be the need of higher education. The only safety
against the influence of a rolling mill is a college, the only safety
against the practical and materializing tendency of an industrial school
is the increased study of whatever contributes to the higher and non-
sordid life of the mind. The South would make a poor exchange for her
former condition in any amount of industrial success without a
corresponding development of the highest intellectual life.
But, besides the industrial problem, there is the race problem. It is
the most serious in the conditions under which it is presented that ever
in all history confronted a free people. Whichever way you regard it, it
is the nearest insoluble. Under the Constitution it is wisely left to
the action of the individual States. The heavy responsibility is with
them. In the nature of things it is a matter of the deepest concern to
the whole Republic, for the prosperity of every part is vital to the
prosperity of the whole. In working it out you are entitled, from the
outside, to the most impartial attempt to understand its real nature, to
the utmost patience with the facts of human nature, to the most profound
and most helpful sympathy. It is monstrous to me that the situation
should be made on either side a political occasion for private ambition
or for party ends.
I would speak of this subject with the utmost frankness if I knew what to
say. It is not much of a confession to say that I do not. The more I
study it the less I know, and those among you who give it the most
anxious thought are the most perplexed, the subject has so many
conflicting aspects. In the first place there is the evolution of an
undeveloped race. Every race has a right to fair play in the world and
to make the most of its capacities, and to the help of the more favored
in the attempt. If the suggestion recently made of a wholesale migration
to Mexico were carried out, the South would be relieved in many ways,
though the labor problem would be a serious one for a long time, but the
"elevation " would be lost sight of or relegated to a foreign missionary
enterprise; and as for results to the colored people themselves, there is
the example of Hayti. If another suggestion, that of abandoning certain
States to this race, were carried out, there is the example of Hayti
again, and, besides, an anomaly introduced into the Republic foreign to
its traditions, spirit, aspirations, and process of assimilation, alien
to the entire historic movement of the Aryan races, and infinitely more
dangerous to the idea of the Republic than if solid Ireland were dumped
down in the Mississippi valley as an independent State.
On the other hand, there rests upon you the responsibility of maintaining
a civilization--the civilization of America, not of Hayti or of Guatemala
which we have so hardly won. It is neither to be expected nor desired
that you should be ruled by an undeveloped race, ignorant of law,
letters, history, politics, political economy. There is no right
anywhere in numbers or unintelligence to rule intelligence. It is a
travesty of civilization. No Northern State that I know of would submit
to be ruled by an undeveloped race. And human nature is exactly in the
South what it is in the North. That is one impregnable fact, to be taken
as the basis of all our calculations; the whites of the South will not,
cannot, be dominated, as matters now stand, by the colored race.
But, then, there is the suffrage, the universal, unqualified suffrage.
And here is the dilemma. Suffrage once given, cannot be suppressed or
denied, perverted by chicane or bribery without incalculable damage to
the whole political body. Irregular methods once indulged in for one
purpose, and towards one class, so sap the moral sense that they come to
be used for all purposes. The danger is ultimately as great to those who
suppress or pervert as it is to the suppressed and corrupted. It is the
demoralization of all sound political action and life. I know whereof I
speak. In the North, bribery in elections and intimidation are fatal to
public morality. The legislature elected by bribery is a bribable body.
I believe that the fathers were right in making government depend upon
the consent of the governed. I believe there has been as yet discovered
no other basis of government so safe, so stable as popular suffrage, but
the fathers never contemplated a suffrage without intelligence. It is a
contradiction of terms. A proletariat without any political rights in a
republic is no more dangerous than an unintelligent mob which can be used
in elections by demagogues. Universal suffrage is not a universal
panacea; it may be the best device attainable, but it is certain of abuse
without safeguards. One of the absolutely necessary safeguards is an
educational qualification. No one ought anywhere to exercise it who
cannot read and write, and if I had my way, no one should cast a ballot
who had not a fair conception of the effect of it, shown by a higher test
of intelligence than the mere fact of ability to scrawl his name and to
spell out a line or two in the Constitution. This much the State for its
own protection is bound to require, for suffrage is an expediency, not a
right belonging to universal humanity regardless of intelligence or of
character.
The charge is, with regard to this universal suffrage, that you take the
fruits of increased representation produced by it, and then deny it to a
portion of the voters whose action was expected to produce a different
political result. I cannot but regard it as a blunder in statesmanship
to give suffrage without an educational qualification, and to deem it
possible to put ignorance over intelligence. You are not, responsible
for the situation, but you are none the less in an illogical position
before the law. Now, would you not gain more in a rectification of your
position than you would lose in other ways, by making suffrage depend
upon an educational qualification? I do not mean gain party-wise, but in
political morals and general prosperity. Time would certainly be gained
by this, and it is possible in this shifting world, in the growth of
industries and the flow of populations, that before the question of
supremacy was again upon you, foreign and industrial immigration would
restore the race balance.
We come now to education. The colored race being here, I assume that its
education, with the probabilities this involves of its elevation, is a
duty as well as a necessity. I speak both of the inherent justice there
is in giving every human being the chance of bettering his condition and
increasing his happiness that lies in education--unless our whole theory
of modern life is wrong--and also of the political and social danger
there is in a degraded class numerically strong. Granted integral
membership in a body politic, education is a necessity. I am aware of
the danger of half education, of that smattering of knowledge which only
breeds conceit, adroitness, and a consciousness of physical power,
without due responsibility and moral restraint. Education makes a race
more powerful both for evil and for good. I see the danger that many
apprehend. And the outlook, with any amount of education, would be
hopeless, not only as regards the negro and those in neighborhood
relations with him, if education should not bring with it thrift, sense
of responsibility as a citizen, and virtue. What the negro race under
the most favorable conditions is capable of remains to be shown; history
does not help us much to determine thus far. It has always been a long
pull for any race to rise out of primitive conditions; but I am sure for
its own sake, and for the sake of the republic where it dwells, every
thoughtful person must desire the most speedy intellectual and moral
development possible of the African race. And I mean as a race.
Some distinguished English writers have suggested, with approval, that
the solution of the race problem in this country is fusion, and I have
even heard discouraged Southerners accept it as a possibility. The
result of their observation of the amalgamation of races and colors in
Egypt, in Syria, and Mexico, must be very different from mine. When
races of different color mingle there is almost invariably loss of
physical stamina, and the lower moral qualities of each are developed in
the combination. No race that regards its own future would desire it.
The absorption theory as applied to America is, it seems to me,
chimerical.
But to return to education. It should always be fitted to the stage of
development. It should always mean discipline, the training of the
powers and capacities. The early pioneers who planted civilization on
the Watauga, the Holston, the Kentucky, the Cumberland, had not much
broad learning--they would not have been worse if they had had more but
they had courage, they were trained in self-reliance, virile common
sense, and good judgment, they had inherited the instinct and capacity of
self-government, they were religious, with all their coarseness they had
the fundamental elements of nobility, the domestic virtues, and the
public spirit needed in the foundation of states. Their education in all
the manly arts and crafts of the backwoodsman fitted them very well for
the work they had to do. I should say that the education of the colored
race in America should be fundamental. I have not much confidence in an
ornamental top-dressing of philosophy, theology, and classic learning
upon the foundation of an unformed and unstable mental and moral
condition. Somehow, character must be built up, and character depends
upon industry, upon thrift, upon morals, upon correct ethical
perceptions. To have control of one's powers, to have skill in labor, so
that work in any occupation shall be intelligent, to have self-respect,
which commonly comes from trained capacity, to know how to live, to have
a clean, orderly house, to be grounded in honesty and the domestic
virtues,--these are the essentials of progress. I suppose that the
education to produce these must be an elemental and practical one, one
that fits for the duties of life and not for some imaginary sphere above
them.
To put it in a word, and not denying that there must be schools for
teaching the teachers, with the understanding that the teachers should be
able to teach what the mass most needs to know--what the race needs for
its own good today, are industrial and manual training schools, with the
varied and practical discipline and arts of life which they impart.
What then? What of the 'modus vivendi' of the two races occupying the
same soil? As I said before, I do not know. Providence works slowly.
Time and patience only solve such enigmas. The impossible is not
expected of man, only that he shall do today the duty nearest to him.
It is easy, you say, for an outsider to preach waiting, patience,
forbearance, sympathy, helpfulness. Well, these are the important
lessons we get out of history. We struggle, and fume, and fret, and
accomplish little in our brief hour, but somehow the world gets on.
Fortunately for us, we cannot do today the work of tomorrow. All the
gospel in the world can be boiled down into a single precept. Do right
now. I have observed that the boy who starts in the morning with a
determination to behave himself till bedtime, usually gets through the
day without a thrashing.
But of one thing I am sure. In the rush of industries, in the race
problem, it is more and more incumbent upon such institutions as the
University of the South to maintain the highest standard of pure
scholarship, to increase the number of men and women devoted to the
intellectual life. Long ago, in the middle of the seventeenth century,
John Ward of Stratford-on-Avon, clergyman and physician, wrote in his
diary: "The wealth of a nation depends upon its populousness, and its
populousness depends upon the liberty of conscience that is granted to
it, for this calls in strangers and promotes trading." Great is the
attraction of a benign climate and of a fruitful soil, but a greater
attraction is an intelligent people, that values the best things in life,
a society hospitable, companionable, instinct with intellectual life,
awake to the great ideas that make life interesting.
As I travel through the South and become acquainted with its magnificent
resources and opportunities, and know better and love more the admirable
qualities of its people, I cannot but muse in a fond prophecy upon the
brilliant part it is to play in the diversified life and the great future
of the American Republic. But, North and South, we have a hard fight
with materializing tendencies. God bless the University of the South!
End of Project Gutenberg Etext Diversities of American Life, by Warner