Who is the agent entitled to control education? What is right education? These questions are interdependent. Two answers have been proposed to the first in history: The State, the Church. In Europe, Liberalism says the State, and insists on secularizing education, by which it means its release from the control of popery. Liberals see clearly that, under that control, there will be no true freedom. But, as they also insist on secularizing the State, their idea of a free education is of one devoid of religion, separating the mental from the spiritual culture. Thus they conclude that education must be Godless, in order to be free. Rome has herself to blame for this error, as for most of European skepticism. She claims that she alone is Christian: independent minds reply, “Then Christianity is evil.” So if her education were the only Christian, freemen would have to reject Christian education. If private judgment is sin; if the hierarchy is the church; if the teacher is a real priest and essential “proxy” between men and salvation; if his teaching is infallible; if the real end of the culture is to enslave the soul to a priesthood with a foreign head; if that head is absolutely superior to the secular sovereignty, such ecclesiastical education will be civil slavery. It is not strange that men seeking civil liberty spurn it.

The mistake is in confounding ecclesiastical with Christian education. Let the Scripture be heard: “The kingdom of God is within you,” consisting, not in a greedy hierarchy, but in the rule of Truth; the clergy are not lords over God’s heritage, but only “ministers by whom we believe”; it has no penalties but the spiritual, reaching no man’s civil rights; its only other function is didactic , and its teaching only binds so far as the layman’s own conscience responds; it is the Church’s duty to instruct parents how God would have them rear their children, and enforce the duty by spiritual sanctions ; but there its official power ends. It does not usurp the doing of the important task it inculcates. As a Christian private man the minister lends other parents his knowledge and virtues to co-operate in their work. But all this implies no danger either to spiritual or religious liberty.

But it will be well for the modern Liberal to pause and ask whether he secures anything by this transfer of the educating function from Church to State? Does he point to the results of Jesuit teaching, spurious, shallow scholarship, an enslaved and morbid conscience, which dares not even wish to break its fetters, the insatiable greed of the hierarchy for influence and money, the hateful perversion of the sacred task to inspire falsehood and prejudice for this end? The picture is sufficiently repulsive. But are only ecclesiastics grasping? Is human nature depraved? Is it essentially the same in all men? Then why are they not to be expected to act in similar ways, when subjected to the same temptations? And the modern Liberal is the last man to overlook this truth; since he is skeptical of all professions of spiritual principles in clergymen, and prone to ascribe secular motives. He should, then, expect the demagogue to show a misguided ambition exactly like the priests. What is the hierarch but a ghostly demagogue? The demagogue is but the hierarch of Mammons’s altar. Does he not, for instance, pervert that other educating agency, the press, just as violently as the Jesuit the school? Now, let him become ruler in the State and the State become educator; and there is just the same risk that the education of youth will be perverted to subserve a faction, and that, by the hateful means of imbuing their minds with error and passion in place of truth and right. The result is despotism of a party instead of pope. One may be as bad as the other.

But if the State is the educator, in America, at least, education must be secularized totally. In theory our State is the institute for realizing secular justice. It has absolutely severed itself from all religions equally; has pledged itself that no man’s civil rights shall be modified or equality diminished by any religion or the lack of any; and has forbidden the establishment of any religion by law, and the imposition of any burden for a religious pretext on any. But the State school teacher is her official, and teaches by her authority. All school-officials derive their authority from State laws, hence all their functions are as truly State actions as those of the sheriff in hanging, or the judge in sentencing a murderer. Especially is the school fund, raised by taxation, the common and equal property of the people.

But as our people are divided among many religions, that money ought no more to be used in schools to teach one religion in preference to the others, than in a church establishment. Once the people of a small State, like Connecticut, were so homogeneous, that any dissentient minority was minute, and the dominant religion was taught “on State account,” without any protest loud enough to be inconvenient. But the mixture of our people, and especially the strength and audacity of popery, now makes all this different. Papists make an effective issue, arguing that the State must not use the people’s money to teach King James’s version, which they, a part of the people, believe heretical. Zealous Protestants, usually zealous State school men, try to flout this plea. But would they assent to the State’s teaching their children, with their money, the version which says: “Except ye do penance ye shall all likewise perish?” They exclaim: “That is an erroneous version, while King James’s is faithful.” Theologically that is doubtless true. But the very point of the State’s covenant with the people is, that the State shall not judge, either way, of that proposition. It has been bargained that, in the State arena, we shall respect papists’ religious views, precisely as we require them to respect ours. Suppose them, some day, in as large a majority in some State as Protestants are in New England, would we acquiesce in their forcing the study of the Douay version in State schools? So, unless we admit that our might makes our right, we ought not to inflict the parallel wrongs on the Jews, Mohammedans, Atheists, and Buddhists among us, because they are still few.

It is sought to parry this conclusion thus: While all religions are equal, and no one established, the State is not an atheistic institute, but must ground itself in the will of God, which is the standard of all rights. That the State is an ethical institute and for ethical ends. That hence it enjoins the Sabbath, punishes blasphemy, etc. That equally the State, while not establishing one religion to the prejudice of others, ought to teach the divine truths common to all, by the unsectarian use of the Bible. But whether this be the just basis of a commonwealth or not, our States do not avow it. And second, the question is not of the original Scripture in common schools, but of some one version, among other competing ones, which even Protestants do not claim to be infallible. Hence the question, Which version? raises sectarian issues. Third, we do not believe, any more than these reasoners, that the State can be atheistic, because it is an ethical institute, and the divine will is the only valid ethical rule. But the State finds the theistic basis in natural theology. The proof is, that pagan States, resting only on natural theism, were valid, and rightfully (Rom.13:5) possessed the allegiance even of Christians. The evasion therefore is futile.

But be the logic of this question what it may, the actual result is certain. The papists will inevitably carry the point, as they have already done in many places. That they will triumph everywhere else that they care to try, is plain from the growing timidity of the Bible advocates, the poverty of the compromises they offer, and the spreading indifference of the masses to the value of biblical teaching. In fact, on American premises, the Bible advocates have no plea but a pious predilection, and sooner or later logical considerations, when so clear, must assert their force. The difficulty of the problem appears thus: That it agitates other free governments than ours, as the British and Holland, at this day.

For the solution there are, on the theory of State education, four suggestions. The first is the unjust one of forcing the religion of the majority on the minority. The second is what is called in Great Britain the plan of “concurrent endowments.” Each denomination may have its own schools endowed by the State, and teach its own religion in it along with secular learning. This is virtually the plan by which New York papists have been partially appeased. It is justly rejected by Protestants everywhere. First, because it offers no solution save where the several denominations are populous enough to sustain a school for each in the same vicinage. Second, because the State has no right thus virtually to assert the co-ordinate and equal value of opposing creeds, the truth of one of which may imply the positive falsehood of another. Third, because the State has no right to indicate of either of the creeds that it is, or is not, true and valuable. Fourth, because Protestantism is more promotive of thrift and wealth than the erroneous creeds; whence a given number of Protestants will pay more school-tax then the same number of errorists, so that this plan uses a part of their money to foster creeds they conscientiously believe mischievous. Fifth, it gives to error a pecuniary and moral support beyond what it would receive from the spontaneous zeal of its votaries. And last, it disunites the population by training youth in hostile religious camps. Irish and American papists have professed to approve because they gain by the plan. But who dreams that if they were in the majority they would be willing to see “good Catholic money” expended in teaching Protestant heresy?

The third plan proposes to give “unsectarian” religious instruction in the first hour of the day, while parents who dissent from it are allowed to detain their children from school until that hour is passed. This amounts to the State’s establishing a religion and using the people’s money to teach it, but permitting dissent without any other penalty than the taxation for a religious object which the taxpayer condemns. That is to say, it places the matter where England places her established religion, since the “Toleration Act” of William and Mary relieved dissenters of penal pains for absence from the Anglican churches. But the thing Americans claim is liberty and not toleration. They deny the State’s right to select a religion, as the true and useful one, for anybody, willing or unwilling. Those who dissent from the selected religion deny that the State may thus expend the people’s money as a bait to careless or erroneous parents to submit their children to the inculcation of error.

The only other alternative is to secularize the State’s teaching absolutely, limiting it to matters merely secular, and leaving parents or the Church to supplement it with such religious teaching as they may please, or none. Some Christians, driven by the difficulty which has been disclosed, adopt this conclusion. The largest number, notwithstanding the difficulty, reject it with energy. Let us see whether this plan is either possible or admissible.

This is really the vital question. It cannot be discussed until we agree what education is, and disperse deceptive misconceptions of it. It is properly the whole man or person that is educated; but the main subject of the work is the spirit. Education is the nurture and development of the whole man for his proper end. The end must be conceived aright in order to understand the process. Even man’s earthly end is predominantly moral. Now, if dexterity in any art, as in the handling of printer’s type, a musket, a burin , a power-loom, were education, its secularization might be both possible and proper. Is not a confusion here the source of most of the argument in defense of that theory? For instance, “Why may not the State teach reading and writing without any religious adjuncts, as legitimately as the mechanic thus teaches his apprentices filing, planing, or hammering?” Because dexterity in an art is not education. The latter nurtures a soul, the other only drills a sense-organ or muscle; the one has a mechanical end, the other a moral. And this answer cannot be met by saying, “let it then be agreed that the State is only teaching an art, a dexterity that, for instance, of letters.” For the State refuses to be understood thus: it claims to educate; as is witnessed by the universal argument of the advocates of this State function, that she has the right and duty of providing that the young citizens shall be competent to their responsibility as citizens. But these are ethical. Again, if the State professed to bestow, not an education, but a dexterity, equity would require her bestowing not only the arts of letters, but all other useful arts. For only the minority can ever live by literary arts; the great majority of children have equal rights to be taught the other bread-winning arts. Thus government would become the wildest communism. No, the State cannot adopt this evasion; unless she says that she educates, she can say nothing.

It should also be remarked here that the arts of reading and writing are rather means of education than education itself, and not the only nor the most effective means. As Macaulay showed, against Dr. S. Johnson, the unlettered part of Athenians were, in some respects, highly educated, while we see many minds, with these arts, really underdeveloped.

But is a really secularized education either possible or admissible?

First, No people of any age, religion, or civilization, before ours, has ever thought so. Against the present attempt, right or wrong, stands the whole common sense of mankind. Pagan, Papist, Mohammedan, Greek, Protestant, have all hitherto rejected any other education than one grounded in religion, as absurd and wicked. Let Mr. Webster be heard against the Girard will, which enjoined, in order to exclude Christianity from his college, that no minister should ever enter its walls. The argument against the will here was, that the trust it proposed to create was, in this, so opposed to all civilized jurisprudence, as to make it outside the law, and so void. So formidable did the point seem to lawyers, that Mr. Horace Binney, of the defense, went to England to ransack the British laws of trusts. It was in urging this point that Mr. Webster uttered the memorable words:

“In what age, by what sect, where, when, by whom, has religious truth been excluded from the education of youth? Nowhere. Never! Everywhere, and at all times, it has been regarded as essential. It is of the essence, the vitality of useful instruction.” And this was not the assertion of Mr. Webster, the politician, but of the learned lawyer, face to face with able opponents, and making one of the most responsible forensic efforts of his life. He knew that he was uttering the weighty voice of history and jurisprudence.

Let another witness be heard of equal learning, and superior character. “It must be acknowledged to be one of the most remarkable phenomena of our perverted humanity, that among a Christian people, and in a Protestant land, such a discussion should not seem as absurd as to inquire whether school-rooms should be located under water or in darksome caverns! The Jew, the Mohammedan, the follower of Confucius, and of Brahma, each and all are careful to instruct the youth of their people in the tenets of the religions they profess, and are not content until, by direct and reiterated teaching, they have been made acquainted with at least the outline of the books which contain, as they believe, the revealed will of Deity. Whence comes it that Christians are so indifferent to a duty so obvious and so obviously recognized by Jew and Pagan?” We are attempting then an absolute novelty. But may not the tree be already known by its fruits? State education among Americans tends to be entirely secularized. What is the result? Whence this general revolt from the Christian faith in this country, so full of churches, preachers, and a redundant Christian literature, so boastful of its Sabbaths and its evangelism? What has prepared so many for the dreary absurdities of materialism? Why do the journals which seek a national circulation think it their interest to affect irreligion? Why so many lamentations over public and popular corruptions? He who notes the current of opinion sees that the wisest are full of misgivings as to the fruits of present methods. As a specimen, let these words, from the Governor of Massachusetts, at a recent anniversary, be taken: “He” (Gov. Rice) “lifted up a warning voice, with respect to the inadequacy and perils of our modern system of one-sided education, which supposed it could develop manhood and good citizenship out of mere brain culture.”

Second, True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of a soul. By spiritual, the divines mean the acts and states produced by the Holy Ghost, as distinguished from the merely ethical. The nurture of these is not human education, but sanctification. Yet education is the nurture of a spirit which is rational and moral, in which conscience is the regulative and imperative faculty; whose proper end, even in this world is moral. But God is the only Lord of the conscience; this soul is his miniature likeness; his will is the source of obligation to it; likeness to him is its perfection, and religion is the science of the soul’s relations to God. Let these statements be placed together, and the theological and educational processes appear so cognate that they cannot be separated. Hence it is that the common sense of mankind has ever invoked the guidance of the minister of religion for the education of youth; in India the Brahmin, in Turkey the Imam, in Jewry the Rabbi, and in Christian lands the pastor. So, everywhere, the sacred books have always been the prime text-books The only exception in the world is that which Rome has made for herself by her intolerable abuse of her powers. Does the secularist answer that this sacerdotal education results in a Boeotian character and puerile culture? Yes, where the sacred books are false Scriptures, but not where it is the Bible which is the text-book. So that these instances prove that the common sense of mankind has been at bottom correct, and has only been abused in some instances, by imposture.

The soul is a spiritual monad, an indivisible, spiritual unit, without parts, as without extension. Those powers, which we name as separate faculties, are only modes of function with which this unit is qualified, differentiated by the distinctions of the objects on which they operate. The central power is still one. From these truths it would appear that it cannot be successfully cultivated by patches. We cannot have the intellectual workman polish it at one place, and the spiritual at another. A succession of objects may be presented to the soul, to evoke and discipline its several powers; yet the unity of the being would seem to necessitate a unity in its successful culture.

It is the Christian ideas which are most stimulating and ennobling to the soul. He who must needs omit them from his teaching is robbed of the right arm of his strength. Where shall he get such a definition of virtue as is presented in the revealed character of God? Where so ennobling a picture of benevolence as that presented in Christ’s sacrifice for his enemies? Can the conception of the inter-stellar spaces so expand the mind as the thought of an infinite God, an eternal existence, and an everlasting destiny?

Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness in its convergency to God, even as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion be excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal. The structure of thought must remain a truncated cone, with its proper apex lacking. Richard Baxter has nervously expressed this truth.

Third, If secular education is to be made consistently and honestly non-Christian, then all its more important branches must be omitted, or they must submit to a mutilation and falsification, far worse than absolute omission. It is hard to conceive how a teacher is to keep his covenant faithfully with the State so to teach history, cosmogony, psychology, ethics, the laws of nations, as to insinuate nothing favorable or unfavorable touching the preferred beliefs of either the evangelical Christians, Papists, Socinians, Deists , Pantheists , Materialists , or Fetisch worshipers, who claim equal rights under American institutions. His paedagogics must indeed be “the play of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted.” Shall the secular education leave the young citizen totally ignorant of his own ancestry? But how shall he learn the story of those struggles, through which Englishmen achieved those liberties which the colonies inherited, without understanding the fiery persecutions of the Protestants under “Bloody Mary ,” over which the Pope’s own legate, Cardinal Pole, was sent to preside? How shall the sons of Huguenot sires in New York, Virginia, or Carolina know for what their fathers forsook beautiful France, to hide themselves in the Northern snows or the malarious woods of the South, and read nothing of the violation of the “Edict of Nantes ,” the “Dragonnades,” and the wholesale assassination of St. Bartholomew’s day , in honor of which an “infallible” predecessor of the Pope sang Te Deums and struck medals? Or, if the physicist attempt to ascend farther in man’s history, can he give the genesis of earth and man, without intimating whether Moses or Huxley is his prophet? Or can the science of moral obligation be established in impartial oversight of God’s relation to it, and of the question whether or not his will defines and grounds all human duty? Or can a Grotius or a Vattel settle the rights of nature and nations without either affirming along with the Apostles that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation,” or else denying it with the infidel ethnologist? How much of the noblest literature must be ostracized, if this plan is to be honestly carried out? The State teacher must not mention to his pupil Shakespeare, nor Bacon, nor Milton, nor Macaulay. The Expurgatorious of free democracy will be far more stringent than that of despotic Rome! But it is not necessary to multiply these instances. They show that Christian truths and facts are so woven into the very warp and woof of the knowledge of Americans, and constitute so beneficial and essential a part of our civilization, that the secular teacher, who impartially avoids either the affirmation or denial of them, must reduce his teaching to the bare giving of those scanty rudiments, which are, as we have seen, not knowledge, but the mere signs of knowledge.

Does some one say that practically this showing is exaggerated, for he is teaching some purely secular course, without any such maiming of his subjects or prejudicing of Christianity? If his teaching is more than a temporary dealing with some corner of education, the fact will be found to be that it is tacitly anti-Christian; overt assaults are not made; but there is a studied avoidance which is in effect hostile. There can be no neutral position between two extremes, where there is no middle ground, but “a great gulf fixed.”

Fourth, Of all rightful human action the will is the executive and the conscience the directive faculty. Unless these be purified and enlightened, to enhance the vigor of the soul’s other actions by training is but superfluous mischief. If in a ship the compass be lost and the pilot blind, it is better that there should not be a great force to move her machinery. The more energetic its motion, the greater is the likelihood the ship will speedily be upon the breakers. Surely this is sufficient to show to the reflecting mind that right moral inculcation cannot be separated at any point or for any time from the intellectual, without mischief.

One very obvious and yet not the weightiest application of this truth is to the discipline of the school itself. No training of any faculty takes place without some government. On what moral basis shall the teacher who wholly suppresses all appeal to religion rest that authority which he must exercise in the school-room? He will find it necessary to say to the pupil, “Be diligent. Be obedient. Lie not. Defraud not,” in order that he may learn his secular knowledge. But on whose authority? There is but one ground of moral obligation, the will of God, and among the people of this country he who does not find the disclosure of that will in the Scriptures, most often finds it nowhere. But this teacher must not inculcate this Bible. Then his mere might must make his right, or else the might of the parent, or of the magistrate, to whose delegated authority he points back. Or his appeal may be to mere self-interest!

Will this government be wholesome for a youth’s soul?

But from a pupil the youth becomes a citizen. He passes under wider and more complex obligations. The end of the State schooling is to fit him for this. The same question recurs, with transcendent moment, On what basis of right shall these duties rest? As a man, it is presumable he will act as he was taught while a boy. Of course then the grounds of obligation employed with him in school should be the ones he is to recognize in adult life. In the State school a non-Christian standard alone could be given him. He cannot be expected now to rise to any better; he may sink lower, seeing the ground then given him had no foundation under it.

That is to say, young Americans are to assume their responsibilities with pagan morals, for these are just what human reason attains from the non-Christian standard. Will this suffice to sustain American institutions? One may say: Natural theism may deduce quite a high ethical code, as witness the Greek philosophy. So could a man who rightly construed the data of his consciousness be an atheist; even the atheist might find in them proof that conscience ought to govern. But he does not, nor does the pagan reason act as Epictetus speculated. Let us begin to legislate for the people as they ought to be, and we shall have a fine card-castle. In fact, Americans, taken as we find them, who do not get their moral restraints from the Bible, have none. If, in our moral training of the young, we let go the “Thus saith the Lord,” we shall have no hold left. The training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for us, practically immoral. If testimony to this truth is needed, let the venerable Dr. Griffin, of a former generation, be heard. “To educate the mind of a bad man without correcting his morals is to put a sword into the hands of a maniac.” Let John Locke be heard. “It is virtue, then, direct virtue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in education. …… If virtue and a well-tempered soul be not got and settled so as to keep out ill and vicious habits, languages and science, and all the other accomplishments of education, will be to no purpose but to make the worse or more dangerous man.” Let Dr. Francis Wayland be heard. “Intellectual cultivation may easily exist without the existence of virtue or love of right. In this case its only effect is to stimulate desire; and this, unrestrained by the love of right, must eventually overturn the social fabric which it at first erected.” Last, let Washington be heard, in his farewell address, where he teaches that the virtue of the citizens is the only basis for social safety, and that the Christian religion is the only adequate basis for that virtue.

But, is not mental culture per se elevating? It is hard for us to give up this flattery, because hitherto education has been more or less Christian. The minister has been the American school-master. But are not the educated the more elevated? Yes. For the reason just given, and for another; not that their mental culture made them seek higher morals, but their (and their parents’s) higher morals made them seek mental culture! We are prone to put the cart before the horse. Again I cite evidence. James Anthony Froude, a witness by no means friendly to orthodoxy, quoting Miss Florence Nightingale, emphatically endorses her opinion, that the ordinary, as the natural effect of the mere communication of secular knowledge to youths, is only to suggest the desire for more numerous, and, for the bulk of men whose destiny is inevitably narrow, illicit objects of desire. But they plead: In teaching the youth to know of more objects of desire you also teach him to know more restraining considerations. The fatal answer is that knowledge does not rule the heart, but conscience (if anything does); mere knowledge, without God’s fear, makes desire grow faster than discretion. Says Sir Henry Bulwer: “I do not place much confidence in the philosopher who pretends that the knowledge which develops the passions is an instrument for their suppression, or that where there are the most desires there is likely to be the most order, and the most abstinence in their gratification.” Again, the soul should grow symmetrically. Let the boughs of a tree grow, while the roots (without actual disease) stand still; the first gale would blow it over, because of the disproportion of its parts.

Fifth, We need the best men to teach our Children. The best are true Christians, who carry their religion into everything. Such men neither can nor will bind themselves to hold so influential a relation to precious souls for whom Christ died, and make no effort to save them. So the tendency must be towards throwing State schools into the hands of half-hearted Christians or of contemptuous unbelievers. Can such be even trusted with an important secular task? Railroads persist in breaking the Sabbath; so they must be served on the track exclusively by profane Sabbath-breakers or truckling professors of religion. The consequence is, they are scourged with negligent officials, drunken engineers, and defaulting cashiers. So the State will fall into the hands of teachers who will not even teach secular learning honestly; money will be wasted, and the schools will become corrupting examples to their own pupils of slighted work and abused trusts.

Sixth, to every Christian citizen, the most conclusive argument against a secularized education is contained in his own creed touching human responsibility. According to this, obligation to God covers all of every man’s being and actions. Even if the act be correct in outward form, which is done without any reference to his will, he will judge it a shortcoming. “The ploughing of the wicked is sin.” The intentional end to which our action is directed determines its moral complexion supremely. Second, Our Savior has declared that there is no moral neutrality; “He that is not with him is against him, and he that gathereth not with him scattereth abroad.” Add now the third fact, that every man is born in a state of alienation from God; that practical enmity and atheism are the natural outgrowth of this disposition; that the only remedy for this natural disease of man’s spirit is gospel truth. The comparison of these truths will make it perfectly plain that a non-Christian training is literally an anti-Christian training.

This is the conclusive argument. The rejoinder is attempted; that Christians hold this theology as church members, and not as citizens; and that we have ourselves urged that the State is not an evangelical agent, and its proper business is not to convert souls from original sin. True, but neither has it a right to become an anti-evangelical agency, and resist the work of the spiritual commonwealth. While the State does not authorize the theological beliefs of the Christian citizens, neither has it a right to war against them. While we have no right to ask the State to propagate our theology, we have a right to demand that it shall not oppose it. But to educate souls thus is to oppose it, because a non-Christian training is an anti-Christian training. It may be urged again, that this result, if evil, will not be lessened by the State’s ceasing to teach at all, for then the training of youth will be, so far as she is concerned, equally non-Christian. The answer is, that it is one thing to tolerate a wrong as done by a party over whom we have not lawful control, but wholly another to perpetrate that wrong ourselves. For the State thus to do what she ought to condemn in the godless parent, though she be not authorized to interfere would be the sin of “framing mischief by a law,” the very trait of that “throne of iniquity” with which the Lord cannot have fellowship.

It is objected again, that if the State may govern and punish, which are moral functions, she may also teach. If we are prepared for the theocratic idea of the State, which makes it the universal human association, To Pan of human organisms, bound to do everything for society from mending a road or draining a marsh up to supporting a religion, then we can conclude thus. But then consistency will add to State schools a State religion, a beneficed clergy , a religious test for office, and State power wielded to suppress theological as well as social error. Again, while secular ruling and punishing are ethical functions, they are sufficiently grounded in the light of natural theism. But teaching is a spiritual function in the sense defined and for teaching beings fallen, and in moral ruin, natural theism is wholly inadequate, as witness the state of pagan society. Christian citizens are entitled (not by the State, but one higher, God) to hold that the only teaching adequate for this fallen soul is redemption. But of this the State, as such, knows nothing. As God’s institute for realizing secular justice, she does know enough of moral right to be a praise to them that do well and a terror to evil-doers.

The most plausible evasion is this: Since education is so comprehensive a work, why may there not be a division of labor?” Let the State train the intellect and the Christian parent and the Church train the conscience and heart in the home and the house of worship. With this solution some Christians profess themselves satisfied. Of course such an arrangement would not be so bad as the neglect of the heart by both State and parent.

Points already made contain fatal answers. Since conscience is the regulative faculty of all, he who must not deal with conscience cannot deal well with any. Since the soul is a monad, it cannot be equipped as to different parts at different times and places, as a man might get his hat at one shop and his boots at another; it has no parts. Since all truths converge towards God, he who is not to name God, must have all his teachings fragmentary; he can only construct a truncated figure. In history, ethics, philosophy, jurisprudence, religious facts and propositions are absolutely inseparable. The necessary discipline of a school-room and secular fidelity of teachers call for religion, or we miss of them. And no person nor organism has a right to seem to say to a responsible, immortal soul, “In this large and intelligent and even ethical segment of your doings you are entitled to be godless.” For this teaching State must not venture to disclaim that construction of its own proceeding to its own pupil. That disclaimer would be a religious inculcation!

But farther: Why do people wish the State to interfere in educating? Because she has the power, the revenues to do it better. Then, unless her intervention is to be a cheat, her secularized teaching must be some very impressive thing. Then its impression, which is to be non-Christian, according to the theory, will be too preponderant in the youth’s soul, to be counterpoised by the feebler inculcation of the seventh day. The natural heart is carnal, and leans to the secular and away from the gospel truths. To the ingenuous youth, quickened by animating studies, his teacher is Magnus Apollo, and according to this plan he must be to his ardent young votary wholly a heathen deity. The Christian side of the luminary, if there is one, must not be revealed to the worshipper! Then how pale and cold will the infrequent ray of gospel truth appear when it falls on him upon the seventh day! In a word, to the successful pupil under an efficient teacher, the school is his world. Make that godless, and his life is made godless.

If it be asked again: Why may not the State save itself trouble by leaving all education to parents? The answer is, because so many parents are too incapable or careless to be trusted with the task. Evidently, if most parents did the work well enough, the State would have no motive to meddle. Then the very raison d’etre of the State school is in this large class of negligent parents. But man is a carnal being, alienated from godliness, whence all these who neglect their children’s mental, will, a fortiori, neglect their spiritual, culture. Hence we must expect that, as to the very class which constitutes the pretext for the State’s interposition, the fatally one-sided culture she gives will remain one-sided. She has no right to presume anything else. But, it may be asked: Is not there the church to take up this part, neglected by both secularized State and godless parent? The answer is, The State, thus secularized, cannot claim to know the Church as an ally. Besides, if the Church be found sufficiently omnipresent, willing, and efficient, through the commonwealth, to be thus relied on, why will she not inspire in parents and individual philanthropists zeal enough to care for the whole education of youth? Thus again, the whole raison d’etre for the State’s intervention would be gone. In fact the Church does not and cannot repair the mischief which her more powerful, rich, and ubiquitous rival, the secularized State, is doing in thus giving, under the guise of a non-Christian, an anti-Christian training. It is also well known to practical men that State common schools obstruct parental and philanthropic effort. Thus, parents who, if not meddled with, would follow the impulse of enlightened Christian neighbors, their natural guides, in creating a private school for their children, to make it both primary and classical, now always stop at the primary. “The school tax must be paid anyhow, which is heavy, and that is all they can do.” Next, children of poor parents who showed aspiration for learning found their opportunity for classical tuition near their homes, in the innumerable private schools created by parental interest and public spirit, and kindly neighborhood charity never suffered such deserving youths to be arrested for the mere lack of tuition. Now, in country places not populous enough to sustain “State High Schools,” all such youths must stop at the rudiments. Thus the country loses a multitude of the most useful educated men. Next, the best men being the natural leaders of their neighbors, would draw a large part of the children of the children of the class next them upward into the private schools created for their own families, which, for the same reason, were sure to be Christian schools. The result is, that while a larger number of children are brought into primary schools, and while the statistics of the illiterate are somewhat changed, to the great delectation of shallow philanthropists, the number of youths well educated in branches above mere rudiments, and especially of these brought under daily Christian training, is diminished. In cities, (where public opinion is chiefly manufactured) high schools may be sustained, and this evil obviated so far as secular tuition goes. But in the vast country regions, literary culture is lowered just as it is extended. It is chiefly the country which fills the useful professions town youths go into trade.

The actual and consistent secularization of education is inadmissible.

But nearly all public men and divines declare that the State schools are the glory of America, that they are a finality, and in no event to be surrendered. And we have seen that their complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for the following results: All prayers, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools. But this will not satisfy Papists, who obstinately and correctly were their religion correct insist that education shall be Christian for their children. This power over the hopes and fears of the demagogues will secure, what Protestants cannot consistently ask for, a separate endowment out of the common funds. Rome will enjoy, relatively to Protestantism, a grand advantage in the race of propagandism; for humanity always finds out, sooner or later, that it cannot get on without a religion, and it will take a false one in preference to none. Infidelity and practical ungodliness will become increasingly prevalent among Protestant youth, and our churches will have a more arduous contest for growth if not for existence.

Perhaps American Protestants might be led, not to abandon but to revise their opinions touching education, by recalling the conditions under which the theory of State education came to be first accepted in this country. This came about in the colonies which at the same time held firmly to a union of Church and State. The Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies, for instance, honorable pioneers in State education in this country, were decidedly theoretic in their constitution. The Reformed religion was intimately interwoven. So all the Protestant States of Europe, whose successful example is cited, as Scotland and Prussia, have the Protestant as an established religion. This and State primary education have always been parts of one consistent system in the minds of their rulers in Church and State. A secularized education, such as that which is rapidly becoming the result of our State school system, would have been indignantly reprobated by the Winthrops and Mathers, the Knoxs, Melvilles, and Chalmers, and it is presumed, by the Tholucks and even Bismarcks of those commonwealths, which are pointed to as precedents and models. It is submitted, whether it is exactly candid to quote the opinions and acts of all these great men, for what is, in fact, another thing from what they advocated? Knox, for instance, urged the primary education of every child in Scotland by the State. But it was because the State he had helped to reconstruct there was clothed with a recognized power of teaching the Reformed religion, (through the allied Church), and because it was therefore able, in teaching the child to read, also to teach it the Scriptures and the Assembly’s Catechism. Had Knox seen himself compelled to a severance of Church and State, (which he would have denounced as wicked and paganish), and therefore to the giving by the State of a secularized education, which trained the intellect without the conscience or heart, his heroic tongue would have given no uncertain sound. Seeing then that the wise and good men in adopting and successfully working this system, did so only for communities which united Church and State, and mental and spiritual training, the question for candid consideration is: What modifications the theory should receive, when it is imported into commonwealths whose civil governments have absolutely secularized themselves and made the union of the secular and spiritual powers illegal and impossible?

The answer may, perhaps, be found by going back to a first principle hinted in the outset of this discussion. Is the direction of the education of children either a civic or an ecclesiastical function? Is it not properly a domestic and parental function? First, we read in holy writ that God ordained the family by the union of one woman to one man, in one flesh, for life, for the declared end of “seeking a godly seed.” Does not this imply that he looks to parents, in whom the family is founded, as the responsible agents of this result? He has also in the fifth Commandment connected the child proximately, not with either presbyter or magistrate, but with the parents, which, of course, confers on them the adequate and the prior authority. This argument appears again in the very order of the historical genesis of the family and State, as well as of the visible Church. The family was first. Parents at the outset were the only social heads existing. The right rearing of children by them was in order to the right creation of the other two institutes. It thus appears that naturally the parents’ authority over their children could not have come by deputation from either State or visible Church, any more than the water in a fountain by derivation from it’s reservoir below. Second, the dispensation of Divine Providence in the course of nature shows where the power and duty of education are deposited. That ordering is that the parents decide in what status the child shall begin his adult career. The son inherits the fortune, the social position, the responsibility, or the ill-fame of his father. Third, God has provided for the parents social and moral influences so unique, so extensive, that no other earthly power, or all others together, can substitute them in fashioning the child’s character. The home example, armed with the venerable authority of the father and the mother, repeated amidst the constant intimacies of the fireside, seconded by filial reverence, ought to have the most potent plastic force over character. And this unique power God has guarded by an affection, the strongest, most deathless, and most unselfish, which remains in the breast of fallen man. Until the magistrate can feel a love, and be nerved by it to a self-denying care and toil, equal to that of a father and a mother, he can show no pretext for assuming any parental function.

But the best argument here is the heart’s own instinct. No parent can fail to resent, with a righteous indignation, the intrusion of any authority between his conscience and convictions and the soul of his child. If the father conscientiously believes that his own creed is true and righteous and obligatory before God, then he must intuitively regard the intrusion of any other power between him and his minor child, to cause the rejection of that creed, as a usurpation. The freedom of mind of the child alone, when become an adult, and his father’s equal, can justly interpose. If this usurpation is made by the visible church, it is felt to be in the direction of popery, if by the magistrate, in the direction of despotism.

It may be said that this theory makes the parent sovereign, during the child’s mental and moral minority, in the moulding of his opinions and character, whereas, seeing the parent is fallible, and may form his child amiss, there ought to be a superior authority to superintend and intervene. But the complete answer is, that inasmuch as the supreme authority must be placed somewhere, God has indicated that, on the whole, no place is so safe for it as the hands of the parent, who has the supreme love for the child and the superior opportunity. But many parents nevertheless neglect or pervert the power? Yes, and does the State never neglect and pervert its powers? With the lessons of history to teach us the horrible and almost universal abuses of power in the hands of civil rulers, that question is conclusive. In the case of an unjust or godless State, the evil would be universal and sweeping. Doubtless God has deposited the duty in the safest place.

The competitions of the State and the Church for the educating power have been so engrossing that we have almost forgotten the parent, as the third and the rightful competitor. And now many look at his claim almost contemptuously. Because the civic and the ecclesiastical spheres are so much wider and more populous than his, they are prone to regard it as every way inferior. Have we not seen that the smaller circle is, in fact, the most original and best authorized of the three? Will any thinking man admit that he derives his right to marry, to be a father, from the permission of the State? Yet there is an illusion here, because civic constitutions confer on the State certain police functions, so to speak, concerning marriage and families. So there are State laws concerning certain ecclesiastical belongings. But what Protestant concedes therefrom that his religious rights were either conferred, or can be rightfully taken away, by civil authority? The truth is, that God has immediately and authoritatively instituted three organisms for man on earth, the State, the visible Church, and the Family, and these are co-ordinate in rights and mutual independence. The State or Church has no more right to invade the parental sphere than the parent to invade theirs. The right distribution of all duties and power between the three circles would be the complete solution of that problem of good government which has never yet been solved with full success. It is vital to a true theory of human rights, that the real independence of the smallest yet highest realm, that of the parent, be respected. Has it not been proved that the direction of education is one of its prerogatives?

But does not the State’s right to exist imply the right to secure all the conditions of it’s existence? And as parents may so pervert or neglect education as to rear a generation incompetent to preserve their civil institutions, does not this give the State control over education? I answer, first, it is not even a pretext for the State’s invading the parental sphere any farther than the destructive negligence exists, that is, to stimulate, or help, or compel the neglectful parents alone. Second, precisely the same argument may authorize the State to intrude into the spiritual circle and establish and teach a religion. But the sophism is here: It is assumed that a particular form of civil institutions has a prescriptive right to perpetuate itself. It has none. So the American theory teaches, in asserting for the people the inherent right to change their institutions. Did our republican fathers hold that any people have ever the right to subvert the moral order of society ordained by God and nature? Surely not. Here then is disclosed that distinction between the moral order and any particular civil order, so often overlooked, but so eloquently drawn by Cousin. So far is it from being true that the civil authority is entitled to shape a people to suit itself; the opposite is true, the people should shape the civil authority.

It is a maxim in political philosophy, as in mechanics, that when an organism is applied to a function for which it was not designed, it is injured and the function is ill done. Here is a farmer who has a mill designed and well fitted to grind his meal. He resolves that it shall also thresh his sheaves. The consequence is that he has wretched threshing and a crippled mill. I repeat, God designed the State to be the organ for securing secular justice. When it turns to teaching or preaching it repeats the farmers’ experience. The Chinese Government and people are an example in point. The Government has been for a thousand years educating the people for it’s own ends. The result is what we see.

Government powerfully affects national character by the mode in which it performs its proper functions, and if the administration is equitable, pure and free, it exalts the people. But it is by the indirect influence. This is all it can do well. As for the other part of the national elevation (an object which every good man must desire), it must come from other agencies; from the dispensation of Almighty Providence; from fruitful ideas and heroic acts with which he inspires the great men whom he sovereignly gives to the nations he designs to bless; chiefly from the energy of divine Truth and the Christian virtues, first in individuals, next in families, and last in visible churches.

Let us suppose, then, that both State and Church recognize the parent as the educating power; that they assume towards him an ancillary instead of a dominating attitude; that the State shall encourage individual and voluntary efforts by holding the impartial shield of legal protection over all property which may be devoted to education; that it shall encourage all private efforts; and that in its eleemosynary character it shall aid those whose poverty and misfortunes disable them from properly rearing their own children. Thus the insoluble problems touching religion in State schools would be solved, because the State was not the responsible creator of the schools, but the parents. Our educational system might present less mechanical symmetry, but it would be more flexible, more practical, and more useful.

Dear Sir:
I have read the essays of “Civis” in your December, January and February numbers with profound interest, and with general approbation. Concurring fully with him in the opposition to the whole theory of primary education by the State, I also feel the force of his views concerning the negro and the common school. For some years I have had strong convictions of the falsehood and deadly tendencies of the Yankee theory of popular State education; and I confess that the influence which prevented my lifting up my voice against it was, simply, the belief that so puny a voice could effect nothing against the prevalent “craze” which has infected the country on this subject. You may conceive, therefore, the satisfaction with which I saw “Civis” take up the cause of truth in the columns of the Religious Herald, and subsequently in the Planter and Farmer, and my admiration for his moral courage, eloquence and invincible logic. With such champions, the cause of truth is not so hopeless as I feared. With equal satisfaction I have seen the Rev. Dr. John Miller, long an honored citizen of Virginia, and a gallant soldier in her army, arguing the same truth in the Tribune, with even more than his wonted terseness, boldness and condensed logic. There is another sign that the cause of truth is not wholly lost: this is the new zeal of the self-constituted protectors of this Yankee heresy in Virginia, in circulating arguments and pleas for their error. These documents have had no other effect on my mind than to awaken the wish that, if we must, perforce, have this false system imposed on us by our conquerors, any executive agency, created to administer the ill-starred plan, might at least have the modesty to stick to its appointed business, and not waste the money of the people in the attempt to manufacture among the people an erroneous public opinion. It is enough to be taxed heavily, against my judgment, for a quixotic project, which can never do me or any one else any good. I am unjustly forced to surrender my money; but I beg leave to preserve the privilege of doing my own thinking. At lease, I do not propose docilely to receive my opinions on it from those, who, in advocating the system, are also advocating their own official emoluments.

While speaking of the general subject, I am tempted to notice a recent argument which is flaunted before us: this is, the rapidly increasing popularity, which, it is claimed, the plan is winning at the South. The reply is, that if this popularity is growing, it exactly confirms the argument of “Civis,” that the system is agrarian, corrupting, subsidizing the people and debauching their independence. Imperial donatives to the Roman populace became very popular; true, but they poisoned the last good element of Roman character, and helped to complete the putrescence of the empire. I fear it is only too true, that this cunning cheat of Yankee state-craft is alluring the poor, harassed Southern parent; and that he is yielding to the bait, which promises deceitfully to relieve him of his parental responsibility. A bribe, alas, may become easily popular in decadent times.

But, you asked for my opinion of this fearful question of the negro in our common schools. It is not necessary for me to repeat the points so strongly put by “Civis.” To one of them only, I would add my voice: the unrighteousness of expending vast sums, wrung by a grinding taxation from our oppressed people, upon a pretended education of freed slaves; when the State can neither pay its debts, nor attend to its own legitimate interests. Law and common honesty both endorse the maxim: “A man must be just before he is generous”. The action of the State, in wasting this money thus, which is due to her creditors, is as inexcusable as it is fantastical. I do know that not a few of our white brethren, before the war, independent and intelligent, are now prevented from educating their own children, because they are compelled to keep them in the corn-field, laboring from year’s end to year’s end, to raise these taxes to give a pretended education to the brats of the black paupers, who are loafing around their plantations, stealing a part of the scanty crops and stock their poor, struggling boys are able to raise. Not seldom has this pitiful sight made my blood boil with indignation, and then made my heart bleed with the thought: “How mournfully complete is that subjugation, which has made men, who were once Virginians, submit tamely to this burning wrong?” “The offense is rank, and smells to Heaven”. Thank God, that I have only to pay, and have nothing to do with the imposition, collection and disbursement of this shameful exaction.

The argument by which they endeavor to reconcile us to it is always this: “Negro suffrage is a fixed fact; Virginians cannot help it; and if the negro is to share in the governing the State, our interest is to qualify him for doing so, by educating him.” To this argument many well-meaning men reluctantly yield. My first remark upon it is: That I am not at all clear, that candor, or truth, or self-respect will allow any Virginian thus to accept the impossible onus, which conquest seeks to impose on us. Radicalism thrusts upon us this fatal innovation of negro suffrage; and then requires of us a promise that we will undertake to make it work safely and beneficently. I beg leave to demur from making any such promise. I do not mean to divide with the conqueror the onus of his ruthless and murderous crime against liberty and civilization. He has committed it; let him bear its responsibility. If it is not undone, it will destroy both American liberty and civilization. If I could prevent that result, I would; and if I believed that I could, I would promise to try. But, knowing that I cannot prevent that result, and that no human power can, unless the crime be retracted, I do not mean to make a deceitful promise, or to divide the damning responsibility of the crime with its perpetrators. If I saw a ruthless quack proposing to divide a man’s carotid artery, in a mad surgical experiment, and he should ask me to promise to tie it up, so as to remedy the murder he was committing, I should tell him that, however anxious to save the life of his victim, I was not able to do it by tying up a carotid artery, and could not promise. If he persevered in murdering the man, he must bear the guilt alone.

For, second; the pretended education which Virginia is now giving, at so heavy a cost, to the negroes, is, as a remedy for negro suffrage, utterly deceptive, farcical and dishonest. The tenor of the argument concedes, what every man, not a fool, knows to be true: that the negroes, as a body, are now glaringly unfit for the privilege of voting. What makes them unfit? Such things as these: The inexorable barrier of alien race, color, and natural character, between them and that other race which constitutes the bulk of Americans: a dense ignorance of the rights and duties of citizenship: an almost universal lack of that share in the property of the country, which alone can give responsibility, patriotic interest and independence to the voter: a general moral grade so deplorably low as to permit their being driven or bought like a herd of sheep by the demagogue: a parasitical servility and dependency of nature, which characterizes the race everywhere, and in all ages: an almost total lack of real persevering aspirations: and last, an obstinate set of false traditions, which bind him as a mere serf to a party, which is the born enemy of every righteous interest of our State. Let the reader look at that list of ailments. Not an item can be disputed. Now, our political quacks propose to cure them, and that in such time as will save the Commonwealth before the infection becomes mortal. And how? by such an infusion of (not education, but) a modicum of the arts of reading, writing and cyphering; which are at best uncertain means, only, for educating; and that, such a modicum as the kind of teachers and schools Virginian can now get, will infuse through the wool of such heads. Does any sane man really believe this remedy will do that vast work? Nay, verily, “Leviathan is not so tamed.” Or, to return to the former trope, we may use the exclamation of John Randolph against a weak book, which was proposed to him, as an antidote for the malignant ability of Bolingbroke’s infidelity. “Venice treacle, and syrup, against Arsenic!” Whether this remedy will save us, may be settled by an argument of fact, unanswerable to every patriotic Virginian. The Yankees have had this “nostrum” of free school education, in full force, for two generations. Has it reared up among them, out of white people, a popular mass fit to enjoy universal suffrage? Did not this very system rear us that very generation, which, in its blind ignorance and brutal passion, has recently wrecked the institutions of America; has filled our country with destitution, woe and murder; and, with a stupid blindness, only equaled by its wickedness, has stripped its own Commonwealths, in order to wreak its mad spite on ours, of the whole safeguards for their own freedom and peace? These are the fruits of this Yankee system of State primary education, as working on a white race. Will it work better on a black race? I have not yet learned enough of that type of “intelligence” which this system seems to foster, to repudiate my Saviour’s infallible maxim, “the tree is known by its fruits”. The Yankee has bragged so much of his “intelligence”, of his floods of books and oceans of newspapers, that some Southern people seem “dazed” by the clamor. Well; there may be “fussiness”, there may be plenty of self-conceit, and flippancy; but I stand simply and firmly by this impregnable fact: This system has not given the Yankee true wisdom enough to prevent his destroying the country and himself. What mere self-delusion is it, to dream that it will give this quality to the negro?

But third: There are causes peculiar to the negro and the South, which leave us no hope that this so-called system of free schools will produce even as much fruit as in New England or New York. One is the fact which “Civis” has so boldly stated: The black race is an alien one on our soil; and nothing except his amalgamation with ours, or his subordination to ours, can prevent the rise of that instinctive antipathy of race, which history shows, always arises between opposite races in proximity. Another cause is the natural indolence of the negro character, which finds precisely its desired pretext, in this pretended work of going to school. Still another is the universal disposition of the young negro to construe his “liberty” as meaning precisely, privilege of idleness. It was easy to see that the free school must needs produce the very result which it is usually producing, under such exceptional circumstances; not education, but discontent with, and unfitness for, the free negro’s inevitable sphere and destiny ¾if he is to have any good destiny ¾manual labor. With such teachers such parents as the negro parents, and such material, it was hopeless to expect any really beneficial knowledge of the literary arts to be diffused among this great mass of black children. The only thing the most of them really learn is a fatal confirmation in the notion that “freedom” means living without work, and a great enhancement of the determination to grasp that privilege. The one commanding and imperative necessity of the young negro at the end of the war, in the eyes of any sober philanthropist, was this: that he should be promptly made to learn some way to earn an honest living. The interest which the Commonwealth had in his quickly learning this vital lesson, was perilously urgent, as I shall show. Instead, then, of giving any negro over five years old a pretext of any sort for evading his righteous and beneficent lot of manual labor, we should have bent every energy of statesmanship and government to the task of somehow keeping the grown negroes at their work, and making sure that the young ones were taught to work. To this end nearly all the practical talent and energy should have been bent. The police administration should have been so omnipotent and energetic as absolutely to cut off the possibility of a negro family’s subsisting by plunder vagrancy should have been rendered impossible by stringent laws, apprenticing the loafer to an industrious citizen. The tolerance of idleness in children approaching adult age, by their parents, should have been made a misdemeanor, justifying the intervention of the magistrate. Such a system of stimuli, if made effective, must have been harsher than domestic slavery. I reply, yes: but in imposing it, we should be but imitating our conquerors, who ordained that the wise, kindly, benevolent, yet efficient system of the South should give place to their more pretentious but oppressive system. We are fully justified by the rights of self-preservation, to imitate their severity. Here is a parable which expresses accurately the folly Virginia has committed. She saw a neighbor of her’s, named, we will say, Smith, who was very rich, and who also had a large family of healthy children. Smith is using a part of his abundance, in sending all of his children to school. Now Virginia is not rich, but desperately poor; and it will be “touch and go” if some of her children do not actually starve before the year is out. Moreover, Virginia’s children are in so feverish, unhealthy a state, that confinement with books is likely to have no effect, except brain-fever. But the old lady sees Smith’s gang passing her door to school every day, with envious eyes. She feels that somehow “book-larnin” is a social distinction. She hears Smith’s children “chaffing” hers about their inferiority of privilege, and she can stand it no longer. So she completes her own bankruptcy to buy an outfit of “store clothes”, and school-books, and sends all her children. Luckless urchins! what they needed was wholesome food and medicine, not books and confinement. The result of this blind disregard of times and differences, and abilities, is, that about the time famine and the sheriff are both knocking at the old lady’s door, her children are sent back to her, in raging delirium from brain fever, either helpless, or rending each other in their phrensy.

Does any one demur, that this picture is extravagant? Then, he has not begun to see the fearful peril of our situation. Indeed, I feel sure that bad as is the present state of Virginia (in consequence of the abolition measure forced upon us) far from the worst is yet to come. What are we to do with this young generation of negroes now growing up? Have men looked that free school is one of the most tragical features in the coming drama? Let these facts be considered. This coming generation will be a numerous one. Men, like “Civis”, are evidently nursing the secret hope that it will not; and to my mind it is one of the most painful evidences of the atrocity of the wrong perpetrated on Virginia by her conquerors, that good, patriotic, philanthropic, Christian men here see the evil fruits of that crime looming up so fearfully, as actually to find a grain of private consolation in the hope! that a race of human beings among us are advancing to the miseries of extermination. I do not find fault with the hope; it is natural I shall naturally and justifiably hope that my wilful destroyer may perish before he murders me I condemn the oppression which has left good and wise men no solace except in that hope. They scan the bills of mortality in Southern cities with a sigh of relief. Doubtless city-life is a devouring gulf for the poor freedman, but Virginia is a rural State; and in the country, the lazy freedman multiplies, unstinted by his poverty. The climate is genial, the winter is short, the persimmons and black berries span the larger part of the year; the “old hares” are prolific; the old freedmen, once slaves, still do about half work, and produce some provisions; and above all, the process of eating up the white people by petty pilfering is still far from completed. So, between these various resources, country negroes manage to sustain these low conditions of existence, which enable so low a race to multiply; and they multiply on, as yet, very much as in old times. This perilous incoming generation will be a numerous one.

The next fact is, that the negro is a creature of habit. Those whose characters were formed in slavery still carry with them two habits gained their; one, that of work (though gradually relaxing); the other, that of loyalty and affectionate respect for “their white folks”. The new generation cherishes neither. I know of only one or two, of either sex, who are engaged in any self-supporting labor they live on their parents, or on pilfering. Does one see any of them apprenticed to any useful trade, or in the regular employment of any business man? I have with me the testimony of the planters; they tell me that, in hiring hands, they always seek middle-aged ones, who were trained in slavery; the younger are not worth hiring, if they ever offer. I have with me the testimony of the middle-aged freedmen, the fathers and mothers themselves. Their complaint is, that the “young ones have no idea of work they do not know what real work is what is to become of them, the Lord only knows.” All who know the negro character are aware also of that infirmity of purpose which, almost universally renders them inefficient parents. They are either too weak or indulgent, or they are brutally and capriciously severe. Hence, the usual law of negro families is, a low state of parental and filial qualities, dissatisfied parents, and insubordinate children it was always so upon the plantations, except as the master or overseer guided and reinforced the father’s rule; it is flagrantly so now. The ugliest feature of this coming day is, that the young negroes are evidently growing up with a restive, surly, insolent spirit towards the whites, in place of that close family affection, feudal loyalty, and humble pride in their superiors, which once united masters and servants. How can it be otherwise? The family tie is gone forever The “carpet-bager” has played his accursed game upon the negro’s passions. Suffrage and the free school awaken in the young negro foolish and impossible aspirations, which are fated to disappointment, and whose disappointment he will assuredly lay to the door of his white rivals, lately his kindly protectors. One needs only to walk by the way, to see the change of temper. The ex-slave greets his former “white folks” with a smile of genuine pleasure, and with all the deference of old times. But his son and daughter pass without speech, or with a surly nod, and assert their independence by shouldering white children from the sidewalk. What, meantime, is the temper to which these white young people are growing up? They also are strangers to the family feeling; they know nothing of that kindly responsibility and patronage begotten by the former dependence of the servants; to them these insolent young blacks are simply strangers and aliens, repulsive and abhorred. The sons of the heroes who fell at Manassas and Gettysburg are not likely to imbibe from widowed mothers traditions which will make them very tolerant of “negro impudence”.

The State of New Jersey has emancipated her slaves recently enough, for men now living to testify to the effects of the measure. The account that I have uniformly heard from her citizens is this: That the negroes reared in slavery continued to be useful, but that when this generation had passed away, business men ceased, as a general rule, to employ negroes in any permanent contract of labor. They were found too fickle, uncertain and indolent. Ask a New Jersey farmer to employ a negro for his permanent farm help, and he would answer with a smile at your absurdity. After a time negroes almost ceased to be seen in rural districts; they drifted into taverns, barbers’ shops and other places where “jobs” could be picked up. What right have we to flatter ourselves with different result in Virginia?

Now an industrious community can endure a certain percentage of idlers, but if it be increased too much, they poison the community. The body politic is, in this, like the natural body, a certain amount of poison in its circulation can be endured, and eliminated by the emunctory organs, but if the poison is in larger quantity, the man dies. When the generation of freed-negroes, which works feebly, has passed away, can the white people of Southside Virginia endure the pilfering of a body of negroes more numerous than themselves, who will work not at all? And when the white people are at last driven to the end of all patience by intolerable annoyances, and the blacks are determined to live and not to work, collision cannot but ensue. What shall we do with that generation of negroes “educated” to be above work? I see no prospect, humanly speaking, except the beginning of a war of races, which will bring back the provost marshal, and the government of the bayonet, and will, indeed, make us eager to welcome them.

But even if this danger is evaded, I object to this whole scheme of State education for negroes because, if successful, it can only result in wrong. In every civilized country, there must be a laboring class. The idea that this universal “education”, so-called, is to elevate that laboring class into a reading body, and still leave them laborers, is a vain vision. The people who are addicted to manual labor are never going to be students, as a body. It is not so in boasted Prussia, nor in boasting New England. Laborers, if taught the arts of letters in their youth, disuse them in their tiling manhood. The brain which is taxed to supply the nervous energy for a day of manual labor, will have none left for literary pursuits. If our civilization is to continue, there must be, at the bottom of the social fabric, a class who must work and not read. Now, grant that the free school does all that its wildest boasts can claim; that it elevates the negroes out of this grade. Then the only result will be, that the white people must descend into it, and occupy it. Where then is the gain? I, for one, say plainly, that I belong to the white race, and that if I must choose between the two results, my philanthropy leads me to desire the prosperity of my own people, in preference to that of an alien race. I do not see any humanity in taking the negro out of the place for which nature has fitted him, at the cost of thrusting my own kindred down into it. No amelioration whatever is effected in the country taken as a whole; but an unnatural crime is committed to gratify a quixotic and unthinking crotchet.

Again: Let us grant that the free schools effect all that is claimed for the elevation of the negro; that he is actually fitted for all the dignities of the commonwealth, and for social equality. Then, will he not demand it? Of course. Here, then, is my concluding dilemma. If these negro schools are to fail, they should be abolished without further waste. If they are to succeed, they only prepare the way for that abhorred fate, amalgamation. If the State School Board are working for anything, they are working for this; here is the goal of their plans. The most solemn and urgent duty now incumbent on the rulers of Virginia, is to devise measures to prevent the gradual but sure approach of this final disaster. The satanic artificers of our subjugation well knew the work which they designed to perpetrate: it is so to mingle that blood which flowed in the veins of our Washingtons, Lees, and Jacksons, and which consecrated the battle fields of the Confederacy, with this sordid, alien taint, that the bastard stream shall never again throb with independence enough to make a tyrant tremble. These men were taught by the instincts of their envy and malignity, but too infallibly, how the accursed work was to be done. They knew that political equality would prepare the way for social equality, and that, again for amalgamation. It is only our pride which hides the danger from our eyes. A friend from Virginia was conversing, in London, with an old English navy surgeon, who was intimately acquainted with the British West-India Islands. He assured the Virginian that the “reconstruction acts” tended directly to amalgamation, and would surely result in it if persevered in. “Never”, exclaimed my Virginia friend, “In our case, our people’s pride of race will effectually protect them from that last infamy.” “Had ever any people”, replied the ex-surgeon, “more pride of race than the English? Yet they are amalgamating in Jamaica. We have the teachings of forty years’ experience in this matter; when your emancipation has become, like ours, forty years old, you will see.” The Virginian was silenced. Even now, after ten years of the misery and shame of subjugation, one has only to open his eyes to see the crumbling away of the social barriers between the two races. The nearest and heaviest share of this curse of mixed blood will, of course, fall upon the conquered States themselves; but the revengeful mind will have the grim satisfaction of seeing the conquering States reap their sure and fearful retribution from the same cause. Eleven populous States, tainted with this poison of hybrid and corrupted blood, will be enough to complete the destruction of the white States to which they will be chained. The Yankee empire will then find itself, like a strong man with a cankerous limb, perishing by inches, in chronic and hideous agonies. The member which spreads its poison throughout the whole body can neither be healed nor amputated, all will putrefy together.

Is there any remedy? This is the question which will be urged, and those who think with me are listened to with disfavor, chiefly because people do not like to be reminded of a shameful and miserable future, which they suppose to be unavoidable; they prefer to shut their eyes and enjoy the remnants of pleasures which are left them, without disturbance. We shall be asked: Why speak of these things, unless there can be shown a remedy? There might be a remedy, if the people and their leaders were single-minded and honest in their action as citizens. The key-note of that remedy is in “impartial suffrage.” In endeavoring to remedy the dangers of the commonwealth, we must remember that we are a conquered people, and have to obey our masters. Otherwise our straight road back to safety would be at once to repeal negro-suffrage. But our masters will not hear of that. What is called “impartial suffrage” is, however, permitted by their new Constitution. We should at once avail ourselves of that permission, and without attempting any discrimination on grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of bondage”, establish qualifications both of property and intelligence for the privilege of voting. This would exclude the great multitude of negroes, and also a great many white men. And this last would of itself be no little gain, for many more white men have the privilege than use it for the good of the State. Again, the very misfortunes of the time give us this advantage now, for drawing back from the ultra-radicalism of our previous legislation: that the mass of white men are now so impressed with the dishonor and mischiefs of negro suffrage, the majority of those white voters having no property, would even joyfully, surrender their privilege, tarnished and worthless as it is, if thereby the negro could be excluded. This constitutes our opportunity. To this saving reform there is just one real obstacle, and that is, the timid self-interest of the office seeking class. I take it for granted that every sensible man in Virginia thinks in his heart that negro suffrage is a deplorable mistake. But many wish to be elected or appointed to office. These begin to calculate, under the promptings of timid selfishness: “While I should be very glad to see this wholesome reform, it will not be prudent for me to advocate it; because, should a movement for it, advocated by me, perchance fail, then all the classes whom that movement proposed to disfranchise of this useless and hurtful privilege, will be offended with me. So, when self-love desires to be elected to some place of emolument, they will remember me and vote against me. Hence I cannot move in that reform, however desirable.” This is the real difficulty, and the only real difficulty in the way of this blessed step towards salvation. If all the men who now cherish aspirations for office, could only be made to act disinterestedly to forget self, to resolve to do the right and wise thing for the Commonwealth, whether they were ever voted for again or not, the whole thing would be easy. There are a plenty of intelligent young men in Virginia, now without property, who would joyfully join the freeholders in voting to disfranchise themselves for this great end, to make a commanding majority. So that the question, whether the State can be saved from this perdition, turns practically on the other question (as indeed the fate of commonwealths always does), whether her people can for once act with a real honest disinterestedness. If the people and their leaders are capable of that, they can save themselves; if not capable, nothing can save them. And perhaps the verdict of posterity will be, that they were unworthy of being saved. It will be well for all to look this view of the matter fully in the face. Especially is it necessary for the farmers to see precisely where the deliverance and the obstacle to it lie.

The other branch of our remedy should be to reform our school system, both for blacks and whites, back towards the system of our fathers in Virginia, just as fast as possible. I mean the system which prevailed in Virginian up to 1860. I know that all the self-constituted, pretended advocates of the free education disparage that system as miserably partial and inefficient. but our fathers knew what they were about, much better than was supposed. “Young people think old folks are fools, but old people know that young ones are.” Did that old system produce perfect results? No. No system in imperfect human hands ever produces perfect results. Did it teach every adult in the State to read and write? No. But neither will the new one. That is, the new system will no more be able to overcome the inexorable law, that the mass of those addicted to manual labor will not and cannot addict themselves to the literary arts, than our fathers were. And after all the fuss and boast, and iniquitous expense, “the upshot” will be that there will still be just as many adults in the State, who practically will not read, and who will forget how, as before. And there will be far fewer to use their art of reading to any good purpose. How often will men stubbornly forget that the art of reading is not education, but only a very uncertain means of education. With that class for which the free school especially provides, it is usually a worthless means. The feasible and useful education for that class is the development of faculties which take place in learning how to make an honest living. My prediction is already verified in Massachusetts, the very home of the State-school humbug. The annual reports of their own school superintendents confess it. A large part of the rural laboring population, still do not read, have forgotten how to read, do not care to know, and care not a sliver whether their children know. (Here, by the way, is the cause of this new furor for “compulsory education”). Tried by this sober and truthful standard, I assert that the comparative fruits of our old system fully justified its excellence. Again I demand that the “tree shall be known by its fruits.” That was the system which reared the Virginians of 1861: that glorious, enlightened generation of men, which comprehended so clearly the vital importance of the great doctrine of State sovereignty, while the Yankee hordes, reared up under this be-praised system of free schools, ignorantly trampled on it with beastly stupidity and violence: that glorious generation which contended for the right so firmly, so temperately, as to win the admiration of the world: that generation which, when moderation availed no longer, formed the heroic armies which followed Jackson and Lee to the last. Yes, it was the old Virginia system that reared the yeomanry which filled those immortal ranks with such a body of privates so virtuous, so enduring, so brave, so intelligent, as no other generals ever commanded. Yes, “let the tree be known by its fruits.” The tree that bore “the rank and file” of the Stonewall brigade was good enough for me. It may be pruned, it may be watered and tilled, and thus it may be improved. Our true wisdom will be to plant it again. This old system evinced its wisdom by avoiding the pagan Spartan theory, which makes the State the parent. If left the parent supreme in his God-given sphere, as the responsible party for providing and directing the education of his own offspring. This old plan, instead of usurping, encouraged and assisted, where assistance was needed. It was wise again, in that it avoided creating salaried offices to eat up the people’s money, and yet do no actual teaching. It was supremely wise, in that it cut the Gordian knot, “Religion in the State school”, which now baffles British and Yankee wit. It set that insuperable difficulty clear on one side, by leaving the school as the creature of the parents, and not of the State. It was wise in its exceeding economy, a trait so essential to the State now.

I would have our rulers, then, avail themselves of another circumstance growing out of our calamities, to disarm the overweening zeal of the State school men. We can truthfully say to them: “Your system, whether best or not, is simply impracticable for Virginia. You see that she has stretched taxation to the verge of confiscation; and yet her debt cannot be paid and that costly system carried on.” Let two separate “Literary funds”, then, be created, one for whites and one for blacks, each separate, and each replenished from the taxation of its own class. Let “each tub stand upon its own bottom.” Instead of the State undertaking to be a universal creator and sustainer of schools, let it invite parents to create, sustain, and govern their own schools under the assistance and guidance of an inexpensive and (mainly) unsalaried Board, and then render such help to those parents who are unable to help themselves, as the very limited school tax will permit. And let the existence of some aspiration in parents or children be the uniform condition of aid; for without this condition it is infallibly thrown away. “One man may take a horse to water, but a hundred can’t make him drink.”

R. L. DABNEY
Union Theological Seminary, Va., Feb. 21, 1876

Have you seen a single, sensible tax-payer, not a small politician, and thus a suitor for impecunious votes, nor a selfish beneficiary of the plunder disbursed by our school system, who does not denounce the whole measure as injust as mischievous? I have not. The plan has been tried and found wanting. The careful observer of Northern opinion sees that while the demagogues, lay and clerical , still shout for the system, in order to catch the populace, thoughtful men in the North are more radically dissatisfied with it every year, as an expedient for American commonwealths. I could fill quite a scrap book, with reflections of leading Northerners, upon the failure of the system as a diffuser of any real intelligence; upon its tendencies to degrade American literature and obstruct better education (outside the cities) upon the evident increase of crime and incendiary opinions under this system; upon its obvious bearing to rear up an atheistic generation of people and prepare for America’s reign of terror; and upon its futility even to diffuse the art and practice of reading among the laboring masses. Such a scrap-book might be edifying reading for our Utopians. It seems very likely, that they have persuaded Virginia to put on the costly shoes of the Yankees, in this matter, just when they are getting ready to kick them off with disgust.

Their consciousness of the strength of our arguments against the pet plan is clearly betrayed in the false issues they raise. Because we see that this pretended way of education is fallacious, dangerous and wasteful, we are the “enemies of education,” forsooth! Let us see if even their reluctant heads may not be forced to admit, that a man may be a true and hearty friend of a good work, and yet, for that very reason, all the more opposed to a pretended, mischievous, false way of promoting it: It is presumed that the State Commissioner for instance, is a true friend of evangelization of all the people, and especially of the poor and ignorant. Consistency, therefore, makes him an advocate of an established Church to do the evangelizing, does it? Let him speak out! If he says he is not the advocate of evangelization by State-action, and yet the ardent advocate of evangelization, then I ask, by what monopoly of candor or honesty does he, while claiming this for himself, impugn our motives, when we say that we are ardent advocates of the true education of the poor and ignorant (have been working for it all our lives); and yet not advocates of education by direct, State-action? And while on this point, I will add another question: If a man reasons consistently, must not the State-school men’s logic, from the admitted importance of education, to their State scheme, also lead every Christian to advocate a State establishment of Christianity? Why not? And does the Superintendent remember an occasion, at which I was present, when a citizen of Virginia, eminent for moderation, wisdom, age and benignity of character, made him admit that very conclusion, as, under certain circumstances following from his positions?

This suggests a point against our present plan, whose formidable character is now making thoughtful men at the North, and in Britain, tremble. The Redeemer said, “He that is not with me is against me.” There cannot be a moral neutrality. Man is born with an evil and ungodly tendency. Hence a non-religious training must be an anti-religious training. The more of this, the larger curse. But the American commonwealth has expressly pledged herself to a non-religious attitude. Hence, she cannot, by her State-action, endow or inculcate a particular religion. While the population of some States was homogeneous, this radical difficulty was not seriously felt: the people of a Protestant State, like Connecticut, could quietly overstep the true history of their own constitution, in favor of Protestantism; and there was nobody to protest. But now we have Papists, Unitarians, Chinese, Jews and Atheists by the myriads; and they will not acquiesce in the wielding of State-power, in which they have equal rights, for the partial advantage of a creed to which they are opposed. The result will be, that their protests will triumph, as they now do, in many States; and we shall have a generation of practical atheists reared “on State account”; just as clear-sighted men in the North see they have on their hands there, rapidly preparing for them another sans culotte revolution.

In previous discussion, it was also shown, that the system of State-schools is agrarian, or communistic, confiscating the property of one class of citizens for the private and domestic behoof of another. The justice of this charge none know better than those who mix with the people; the power to make the rich man educate their children is the main feature which commends the system to the non-taxpaying voters. It is valued by them as a method of plunder. We have also shown that the system is levelling, and attempts an impossibility: to give all the people literary occupations; whereas in all countries, and in spite of universal schools, it is found that the laboring class does not read, and does not wish to read. It was shown that the scheme confounds education with a knowledge of a few literary arts (reading and writing, etc.,) which are not education, but only possible means thereof; and in the case of the laboring poor, far the most questionable, and least efficient means of true education. The tendency of the State’s interference was shown to be, to degrade the standard literary education, while diffusing its poorest elements: since we see good schools disappear as the primary ones are multiplied. The degradation of literature follows from the same cause, by reason of the attempt to supply a groveling or shallow literature for the multitude of minds one-tenth part educated. It was proved by stubborn facts, that common schools have multiplied crime and pauperism, by a natural influence, suggesting to the laboring classes new wants, without increasing in them the power of moral self control or the means of lawful indulgence. And the dishonesty of their advocates has been again and again exposed, in continuing to appeal to their deceptive cry, “Better economy to build school-houses than jails”; after It has been proved to them, that the multiplication of their school-houses has multiplied the jails. The fearful dangers to the morals of children, by promiscuous minglings in these schools, has been pointed out; and are receiving confirmations in many parts of the country, in the spread of abuses too gross to be ventilated in public. The certainty that our schools will be perverted by demagogues for party purposes, was pointed out; and was illustrated by facts; while the intolerable and tyrannical nature of this usurpation was displayed. Last: the lights of the wiser statesmanship of better days were adduced, to show how perilous it is to fix on the community any system whatsoever, the nature of which is, to subsidize many persons, by giving them a selfish, pecuniary interest in the perpetuation of it, or of its abuses. For, should the system prove unwise, or should new circumstances require its change or repeal, the self-interest of all these subsidized classes will prompt them to clamor and defraud the public mind, so as to make the needed repeal impossible or extremely difficult.

The course of this discussion has added a pungent illustration to the power of our last argument. No sooner was a discriminating inquiry turned upon the new system, than it was discovered that it had already bribed so many classes, other than tax-payers, that candid and patriotic discussion was hopeless. A State Superintendent in the metropolis, a county Superintendent in each county, with his gang of petty tax gatherers, his school board for each “township,” his company of school-masters and schoolmarms, with their whole cohort of pauper parents, at once waked up to the fact that their much be praised system enabled them very conveniently to keep their hands in the pockets of other people. All these joined, in many places, in raising a mercenary clamor, which has drowned fair discussion. And our minute politicians, in whose breasts votes are the breath of life, are seen so intimidated, that hardly one of them dares whisper a doubt against the idol of the socialists. The manner in which this debate has been conducted by many of these petty place holders would have been enough, were Virginia what she once was, to overwhelm the whole affair with righteous disgust and indignation. Citizens who have the right of tax-payers, to be heard touching their rights, and State-affairs; who are, in many cases venerable for grey hairs, for experience, for integrity, and for long lives of labor and sacrifice for the honor of Virginia, have been seen yelped after by these officials, (whose only known service to the State has been drawing salaries wrung from it by a grinding taxation), with obloquy and ridicule. This is an indecency which deserves only chastisement.

The time was, when Virginian officials had manners and principle enough to keep silent in a debate touching their own emoluments ; they felt that delicacy, not to say common decency, prompted the leaving of such questions to be considered by that larger part of the citizens who had no pecuniary interest in the issue. The time was, when Virginia had a righteous constitution, the work of statesmen and not of demagogues; and that instrument contained this provision: That no member of a Legislature which debated and decided the creation of a salaried office, should take office under the act of creating it. The reason of this excellent law was, that the very indecency on which I remark might be made impossible, at least, in the Legislature; that no man, when handling the rights of his fellow-citizens and of the State, should run even a risk of having his judgment warped by a pecuniary and personal consideration. But we have now seen all this indecent clamor from the throats of paid officials; and we have seen the School Commissioner actually employing the people’s money to flood the State with ex parte documents and arguments, designed to forestall the expression of the people’s judgment as to measures in debate before them, and liable to be justly condemned by them. All that the school law, bad as it is, could pretend to create such officials for, was, to execute the provisions of the law. But under the thin pretext of diffusing information about education, they misapply the people’s money to the work of manufacturing, in Virginia, a Yankee public sentiment, alien to the genius and traditions of Virginia, promotive of the continuance of their personal emoluments! And Virginians stand this?

The utter inadequacy of the pretext for the universal negro schooling was also pointed out: that “as they are to vote, it is our duty and interest to educate them into intelligent voters.” We showed that primary education, larger than that given to our negroes, had utterly failed to make intelligent voters out of the white proletariat of the North, and we urged this plain, honest query: What right have they to promise Virginia that a smaller dose of their physic which we see only impotent and mischievous there, will do any good here? The facts they dare not deny; but at the plain, stubborn question they refuse to look. Blinking that, they only repeat the refuted pretext, an average specimen of the honesty of the logic. The radical nature of the perils attending negro suffrage was pointed out to them, from difference of color and race, alien blood, race antipathies, savage morals, total absence of property-stake in the common weal, subjection to poisonous and malignant outside influences; and it was asked, Will such a mite of arts of reading and spelling, as Virginia free negro children are going to retain, be any remedy at all for these strong perils? Every man’s common sense answers: Just as trustworthy as a minute bread pill for the yellow-fever! Every man’s common sense also shows him, that while this sham-schooling will be utterly futile for the end proposed, it will be efficacious for harm, by giving young negroes pretext for the idleness and the false expectations which are their and our great perils. The art of reading may be quite a good thing for him who uses it aright, but these young negroes are in perishing need of learning many things which are, for them, infinitely more momentous than this questionable boon, and which these baubles of schools fatally prevent their learning: how to turn a good furrow, how to make an honest day’s work, how to groom a horse, how to cook a wholesome loaf, how to wash a shirt, how to whet a scythe, how to mow and acre of grass per day, and above all, how to live without stealing. We solemnly tell the school-men that they are giving the country a generation of young negroes whose inevitable destiny is to work or steal, whom they are so rearing, that they neither wish to work nor know how. The property-men of the country cannot hire them, because they know nothing useful to an employer; and the young negroes would not hire themselves if they were fit for anything. Come, gentlemen, lay aside utopianisms, and sophisms, and “false facts,” and tell us, if you please, what Virginia is to do with a half million of young negroes thus trained to impotency, when the old generation, educated by slavery are gone? Give each one of them a school to teach? Will they not all have the natural wants and desires of human beings? Neither able nor willing to work, will they not take? Can poor, impoverished Virginia stand up under so much lettered pauperism? Will not the alternatives be universal bankruptcy or anarchical resistance? The question is solemn and urgent.

We urge, again, the burning injustice of the present law, taxing the former owners, after plundering them, for the pretended education of negroes Virginia had her own system for educating her negroes. It was a good system, approved by two centuries of experience. It turned miserable savages into a decent, useful, Christian peasantry. It even diffused fully as much of the arts of letters as the Africans were in a condition to profit by! For it is well known that every young negro slave who showed any worthy aspiration at all was usually taught to read in his master’s family. It was a system of education, solemnly sanctioned by the laws, human and divine, and guaranteed to us by the Federal Constitution and the enactments of Congress. Well, it suited the invader’s purposes of ambition to tear down our good, old, legalized, beneficent system of education for the negro, and to confiscate our property in him, thus reducing the white community to the verge of destitution. And then, the oppressor turns around and taxes us, already so ruthlessly injured, for means to attempt a new, expensive and worthless system for repairing the ruin which he had himself perpetrated in destroying the well tried and lawful system! The destruction of the good, old system was his work a work wrought exclusively for his own aggressive ends. Let him bear the cost of repairing his own mischief. There was wickedness enough in the doing of it, in all conscience. But now, when he turns upon the injured party, and again plunders them, under the pretense of taking means to repair his own first crime, the wrong is “rank and smells to heaven.” I see not how any righteous mind in Virginia can have anything to do with it, except to protest, while he unavoidably submits.

Hence it is, that when any white man among us pretends to be an ex animo approver of this plan, my common sense compels me to be skeptic as to his sincerity. The old Irish fish woman tried to persuade her customer that the eels rather liked skinning; but the eels never said do; and had one of them professed satisfaction with the process per se, I should have persisted in the doubt whether he were a candid and truthful eel. From this point of view, the sensible reader sees that the very inception of this State-school matter in Virginia stamped its motive with insincerity. The “Underwood Constitution” itself, thrust down Virginia’s throat as it was, by the breech of Provost Marshal’s musket, did not require the Legislature to put any system of State schools in operation until 1876. Every patriotic reason should have prompted us to wait as long as our masters allowed us. The State was in a condition of financial exhaustion, which made any breathing time, however short, a boon to her; and her credit was already staggering under a load she could be just carry. There was no experience anywhere in the world, to guide a Legislature in such a problem as the Underwood Constitution imposed; the education of two different and hostile races on the same soil and in the same system, and in Virginia, there was a total lack of experimental knowledge of State education on the Yankee-plan. It would have been most beneficial to wait a season, and thus gain the benefit of other’s experiments. Our conquerors, whose imperious will imposed this plan on us, then had the full fever of their hatred and triumphs on their spirits. Every year that passed was likely to abate something of their fury, and take some of the “wire-edge” off their despotism, so as to hold out the hope that in 1876 they would be less exacting of their subjects than in 1870. At least, one would have thought, the Legislature, driven by their masters to so vast, expensive and untried a work, would proceed tentatively, during the six years of grace, and risque only small experiments, until they had felt their way. The propriety of delay is evinced by this plain question: Does anybody dream, that in 1876, after Funding Bill, after all the experiences, the disappointed hopes, the decline in real estate, the ebbing of resources of those six disastrous years, any Legislature could have been mad enough to commit the State to the cumbrous and costly incubus fixed on us by the action of 1870? Nobody. The blunder would have become impossible by 1876. Well, all that we might have gained by the experience of these six years, with five millions of dollars, (spent on these sham-schools), which might either have paid off one-sixth of our whole debt, saving the State’s credit; or, if left in the people’s hands, might have fecundated private enterprise all over the State; all this our Legislature threw away in 1870, by its precipitate, superserviceable zeal in carrying out the orders of our conquerors. Why did they thus run six years ahead of their master’s own orders, in the face of all these obvious considerations for delay? To buy votes for themselves in country elections; to disarm the objections of radical demagogues, who were hounding on the negro voters after the spoils of the promised school-system; to ingratiate themselves with the non-taxpaying voters, by giving them speedily this pretext for thrusting their hands into their neighbor’s pockets. Thus the system was begun, not in wisdom or patriotism, but in self-seeking. Is it asserted that it was necessary to throw this “tub to the whale” at once in order to appease radicalism and save the State government from its clutches? I reply by the question: Was radicalism appeased? Did it not wield the whole negro vote substantially, notwithstanding the “tub?” The State was saved from its foul clutch, not by any appeasing or dividing of its greed, but in spite of that greed. Had the ruler of the State and the leaders of the Conservative party then assumed a quiet, honest position they would have met the clamor for precipitating the school system thus: “When the stipulated time comes, we shall duly perform the covenant, which a hard necessity has forced us to agree to. The poverty of the State and the true interests of both races forbid our anticipating the task. No obligation exist to do so, consequently no charge of bad faith can lie for our not doing so.” This honest attitude would have been so impregnable that it would have put the Conservative party in a far better position before its enemy than it ever gained from its cowardly haste and rashness.

But I have still more practical objections to make against our present school-laws and their administration. I charge that, even if we granted the propriety of the Yankee theory of universal common-school education on State account and under State control; even if the Underwood Constitution were right in this thing which I utterly deny still our present system is wicked, tyrannical, wasteful and unnecessarily burdensome to an impoverished people, and comparatively inefficient as an execution of its advocates’ own false theory. If it be granted that theory is to prevail in Virginia, still the present school-laws and their administration are flagrantly vicious, and call for the reform of the Legislature. This I shall prove in a practical way, by comparing it with actual results in the present and the past. My argument will proceed on the maxim, that what has been done by others in the same circumstances, can be done by Virginia.

First. I bring our boasters to the test of a comparison with the existing system in the State of Georgia, the “Empire State of the South.” Georgia, like us, has been forced by her conquerors to embark in the Yankee theory of universal primary education on the State account and under State control. The vital article of their present Constitution compelling this is as follows:

“There shall be a thorough system of common schools for the education of children in the elementary branches of our English education only, as nearly uniform as practicable, the expenses of which shall be provided for by taxation or otherwise. The schools shall be free too all children of the State, but separate schools shall be provided for the white and colored races.”

The revenues provided by the Constitution and laws, to support all the schools, are the poll tax, the interest on the existing school fund, a special tax on shows, a tax on the sale of liquors, a dog tax, and half the net earnings of the “State railroad.”

No property tax is laid, either on State or local account, on any real or personal property of individuals, to support common schools. Thus the grand iniquity of our agrarian system is avoided. Even the Legislature is sternly inhibited from authorizing any local taxations, by any local authority whatsoever, for school purposes, until the tax has been expressly approved by two-thirds of the voters of the locality (city, or county, or town). Even this guarded power the Legislature has hitherto wisely refused to grant; and so far no property tax is wrested from any one citizen to help to educate another man’s family.

Now let us contrast our “bill of abominations.” The Legislature, in addition to the income of the “literary fund” and certain escheats and fines, levies on all property, for a general or State school fund, a direct tax of ten cents per $100 annually. But this outrage is only the small beginning. The county school board may also tax all property in the county to the same rate; and the “district school board,” the littlest and last gradation of petty tyranny, the three trustees of a township, may exercise this highest attribute of sovereignty, and tax their (fellow-citizens, I was about to write, erroneously) subjects, to the rate of ten cents on the $100 of all property! Thus, besides the other very considerable exactions with come ultimately from the people, we have property taxed 30 cents on every $100, to educate the children of those who pay no tax, or nearly none. This is three-fifths of all that she now exacts for all her other purposes, in these days of enormous and reckless taxation and expenditure! But who are the “country board” and the “district board?” The “district board” is one of three “trustees” for the townships, appointed by the county superintendent, county court (judge), and commonwealth’s attorney! And who appoints the “county superintendent?” The State school board nominally Dr. Ruffner actually, according to his own admission. And the county judge? He is elected for a term of years by the Legislature. And the commonwealth’s attorney? He is elected by the non-taxpaying voters of his county; in my county, elected by pauper negroes. And who is the “county school board?” These little office-holders, thus appointed of the several townships, with the county superintendent again, constitute the “county school board.” Thus the power of taxing the people, the most important function of sovereignty, is entrusted to persons with whose appointment the people can have nothing direct to do. This is an outrage against the first principles of free government: that representation must accompany taxation. True, this county board is directed by law to report their proposed levies to the county “board of supervisors,” who are elected by the people, i.e., by the non-taxpaying voters; in our county, by the pauper negroes. But in this matter of the school levies, this board of supervisors is, to the school board, only what a “lit de justice” was to Louis XIV. of France. It can hear, register and enforce their majesties’ edicts, and hound on the constable who sells the last cow of the white widow of a Confederate soldier to play at schooling the brats of negroes who are stealing out of the field the poor little crop of corn she has tilled with the hands of her fatherless boys. The law itself is so worded as constructively to enjoin the supervisors to ordain whatever levies the school board demands, provided it does not pass the maximum limit.

Why this outrage on the principles of free government? The nature of the Underwood Constitution is to make each township a corporation for township purposes. Why did not the law allow the township corporation, like all other corporations in the land, to elect its own officers? Ah, the concocters of the tyranny did not mean to allow the sacred principle, for which our fathers fought, to hold here, for fear the citizens in the townships should use their right of elections to protect their property from plunder under the name of school tax! One might have thought that they had sufficient guarantee of lavish taxation, in the universal and the negro suffrage prevailing in the townships, where the voters who pay no property tax have the power of a majority, to vote away the property of the minority who do pay. But this sweeping and ruthless power, wicked as it is, was not enough for the artificers of our system; so, to make sure that property shall be absolutely helpless, under the robbery designed, they also sundered representation from taxation, and gave the taxing power, in township and county, to persons not elected by the tax payers. Our system is worse than those of the Yankees, from whom our school men seem so greedy to borrow; for, while the major part of the school money in the Yankee States usually comes from the local taxes, the rights of townships and their citizens in assenting to those taxes are more respected. The township there is a little republic, and exercises the rights of one; ours are in names, corporations, but helpless corpses in fact, under the exactions of these officials with their foreign appointments.

Once more; bad as the laws are, I have the personal evidence, that these irresponsible exactors are capable of transcending those laws. They actually made me pay in Prince Edward county, for 1877, to the State ten cents of every $100 for school purposes. To the county and district jointly twenty cents on every $100 of my real estate in Prince Edward, and 26 9/10 on every $100 of my personal property. I have the county treasurer’s receipt for this lawless plunder (6 9/10 cents per $100 more than the maximum allowed by their own tyrannical laws) in my desk. It may be satisfying to the curious to know how much tax a countryman pays who has no municipal taxes and no municipal privileges. On my little mite of real estate: To the State, county and schools, 105 cents on every $100 of value. On my personal property to the State, county and school, 127 6/10 cents on every $100 of value, besides my separate income tax. This is quite near enough to confiscation, especially on real estate which yields the owner just 0 per cent. annually. Of course there is no redress. Every well informed person knows that this is just the kind of oppression which John Hampton resisted in the famous case of the ship-money, and which ultimately cost Charles I. his head. But the despotism in Virginia is so much more crushing than that of the absolutist king, that any man who made a stand for his rights here would be simply laughed at.

Now, the point of my comparison is, that Georgia is as distinctly committed to the wrong system of universal State-schools as Virginia is. Yet Georgia can set up that system without trampling, in this way, on the rights of the people. The Legislature of Georgia could at least avoid that self-evident enormity, of enabling the non-taxpaying majority to vote away the money of the paying minority without redress to the latter. She did at least avoid the wickedness of so legislating, as that the power of levying and disbursing property-taxes should be placed in the hands of one class of the people who do not pay; while the necessity of paying taxes is imposed on a distinct class those who own property. If this is not “class-legislation” the essence of oligarchy I know not what is. Georgia, knowing that, with universal white and negro suffrage, the class who pay no property tax must always be in the majority, wisely refuses to levy any property tax for schools. The only general tax she allows to be levied on her people for this communistic purpose is a poll-tax, in which rich and poor pay alike.

Now, if we must have the Yankee system, why cannot our Legislature imitate the wisdom and moderation of Georgia? Let all property-taxes, State and local, for school purposes, be abolished. Let the poll-tax be dedicated to that use, with the proviso, that the parent must at least pay the poll-tax, in order to enter his children. And, if this would not make a sum sufficiently splendid for our enthusiasts, let us imitate Georgia again, and devote the liquor-tax to the schools. The Auditor estimated that the Moffet law, properly applied, would yield $600,000. Is not that, added to the poll-tax and the income of the literary fund, enough to glut the rapacious maw of the School Board? Give them this; and we shall at least have the consolation of knowing, that we are not plundered to support a mischievous system, unless we choose to commit the folly of tippling.

The powers given these petty officials by our laws are also tyrannical in the matter of school buildings and fixtures. These officers, practically irresponsible to the people, decide that any building they please are needed, and the people are taxed, “will they, nill they” to build them. The county Superintendent is armed with the power of condemning a building, already paid for by the people’s money, and disposing of it. He who does not see here openings for corrupt robbery must be blind indeed. I know that officials may be found, who do not build or alienate school-houses for jobbery , and who endeavor to consult the poverty of the people. but the system is evil, in that it gives the power to unscrupulous men; in that it applies the temptation to human nature. And I know that abuses do exist, showing cruel oppression of our burdened tax-payers. I know of a school-house, needlessly built, against the advice and protest of discreet tax-payers, in a township of honest country people almost bankrupted already by taxes, occupied by a pretended school one or two seasons, and since standing empty, except as used, without authority, for a tobacco barn! How many hundreds of such cases exist? The people are so tired out and crushed with oppressions, that they are too languid to protest; and such doings pass sub silentio.

But now, let us compare the cost of our schools, and those of Georgia; a vital point when our State is hovering over insolvency. Georgia spends, in one year, $434,046. Virginia spends, for one year, $1,050,346!!! Georgia is the undiminished Empire State of the South, with ——– of population, and ———– millions of taxable property. Virginia is shorn of one-third the dimensions by dismemberment and claims only ——— millions of taxable values.

Again, the total expense of working the system in Georgia is $6,390.58. The expense of working our system is, by the Superintendent’s own figures, $170, 837.78. This includes nothing for building school-houses; all this immense sum goes for salaries, fees and rents, etc. Is it any longer a surprise to the people of Virginia, that there is an indecent and vicious resistance to all the amendments, on the part of this well-pampered crew? The number of children in Georgia (of both colors) between the ages of six and eighteen is reported to be 394,037, the number enrolled was 179,405, and the actual average number in the schools was 115,121. In Virginia (see reference above) the number of both colors between five and twenty-one years, was said to be 482,789, (the difference of 88,752 in favor of Virginia would be more than offset by the children between five and six, and between eighteen and twenty-one, not enumerated in Georgia), and the average actually taught last year was 117,843. That is to say: our Virginia system teaches but 2,722 more children than the Georgian system, but costs our distressed State nearly twice and a half as much money. Why cannot our system be wrought as cheaply as the Georgian? Look at the enormous salary list on our plan: Salary for State Superintendent; salaries for his clerks; office expenses at the seat of government; salaries for a cohort of county Superintendents, at the tune of $300 for each of the first ten thousands of souls in his county, and $20 for each subsequent thousand; so that a county of eighteen thousand souls pays for these few duties a salary of $460: salaries to clerks of county boards and district boards; salaries of Treasurers, per diems for district trustees, salaries for the enumerators of children; so that, for every four dollars and fifty cents which reaches the teachers the men who do all the real work one dollar of the people’s money is stopped on the way to grease the palm of some blatant advocate of the system, who teaches no child at all. But, on the Georgian plan, the county Superintendent receives no pay but a small per diem for the days actually devoted to his duties; and the county boards no pay at all, except exemption from jury and road services. Why cannot Virginians serve the cause of education as cheaply as Georgians?

Again, the monthly cost of the Georgian child for schooling is 84 1/3 cents. The monthly cost of the Virginia child is $1.40.

Or, let us take this view of the economy of our system. The average pay of primary male teachers in Virginia is $33.10 per month; of female teachers, $27.37 per month. But private parties have no difficulty in employing young ladies, of liberal culture, who actually teach the higher English branches, Latin, French and music at prices ranging from $12 to $15 per month with board. Every country housekeeper knows that the board of a young lady in his family does not add $10 per month to his actual expenses. So that private parties can get competent persons to teach the higher branches for $22, when the State gives $27.37 for teaching the plainest rudiments. Yet the boast was that the State would do the work so much more economically! There are accomplished ladies now in Virginia laboring long hours in schools unendowed by the State, at $150 per year without board. Negro fellows, on the other hand, who would think themselves well paid at $8 per month in the field, and young negro women who would be satisfied with $5 per month in the laundry, are paid $33 and $27 per month, while white ladies are reduced to work for $12 or $15. No wonder the system is popular with negroes and office-holders.

One other excellent feature of the Georgia law is secured by the very Constitution of the State Art. viii, Sec. 5. “Nothing contained in Sec. 2 of this Art. shall be construed to deprive schools in this State, not common schools, from participation in the educational funds of the State, as to all pupils therein, taught in the elementary branches of an English education.”

The meaning of this provision is, that all schools created and regulated by parents themselves, shall have the same title to a share in the school fund to pay for instruction in the English rudiments with those created by the State, provided the teachers of the former come under a few simple regulations ensuring the useful performance of their duties. The vital advantage of this is, that the State of Georgia restricts and limits that intrusion into and usurpation of parental rights and responsibilities within the narrowest limits permitted by her conquerors, which our system studies to push to the most sweeping and enormous extent. The State of Georgia recognizes the right of parents to say where a school is needed, how it shall be regulated, who shall be its teacher, what shall be its text-books, what its moral or religious regimen. The State of Virginia does all that can be done to wrest these inalienable rights and duties from the parents to whom God and nature have given them, and vest them in three “school trustees.” The State of Georgia says to parents: “Exercise your rights of choice, and the Commonwealth will acquiesce and pay the portion of the fund equitably due your families, to the teacher of your choice.” The State of Virginia virtually says: “I claim, like pagan Sparta, to be parent of all children, and to usurp the rights of natural parents in dictating by my officials, where, how, and by whom your children shall be educated; and if any parent insist on his rights of doing his own natural duties to his own offspring, he shall be punished therefore, by having his property taken from him to educate other people’s children in ways he did not elect.” There is the difference.

The experience of every practical man will teach him how conducive this feature of the Georgia law is to flexibility, convenience and economy. The parents of a neighborhood create a school; they are the best judges where it should be situated, and who had best teach it; for they are actuated by disinterested love for the children, and sound common sense. They furnish the house and appliances. Hence, every dollar the State contributes is applied to the cost of actual instruction. The plan has the flexibility needed for a sparse population; the wishes of parents, desiring higher tuition for their children, co-operate with the wishes of the State desiring primary tuition for all; and public and private interests work together for the mutual benefit of the property-class and the poor.

It may be claimed, that a similar thing is sometimes done in Virginia. If it is, it is done informally, and outside the provisions of our iron system. The instances speak well, not for the system, but for the good sense and right feeling of some of the officials.

Now let us proceed to compare our system with the former system bequeathed by our wise fathers. Before the war, it was much the fashion with the Utopians to belabor that system with abuse, as inefficient and partial. But experience now proves that the results were every whit as complete and useful as the results of our present oppressive plan, while the old one has the unspeakable advantages of economy and foundation in civil principles.

According to the report of William A. Moncure, Second Auditor, the literary fund of Virginia accomplished in 1858 the following results: The number of schools assisted in Virginia was 3,847. The number of poor children sent to school was 54,232. The average attendance of these children was not quite twelve weeks, or three months of school time. The average annual cost of the tuition and books of each child was $2.96, or about $1 per month for the time actually spent in study. And the total cost of the system to the State was only $160,530. The addition made for the expenses of administration seems to have been, in all, $18,047, if we rightly infer from the Second Auditor’s figures. The whole expenses of the central administration were but $2,750 (as against $5,819 in 1877), and the only other salaried agents were the county superintendents, who received, what one of them calls in his report, a “little pittance.” “School commissioners,” in all the counties, performed their duties gratuitously, and were prompt and proud to do so from philanthropy and patriotism. Why cannot this be done now? The Reports from all the counties, while recognizing defects, and admitting that the results were incomplete, yet inform the government of the general popularity and progressive utility of the system. But now, the general verdict which comes up from disinterested and intelligent men in all quarters is, that our present system is an expensive, mischievous and cruel sham.

Per contra, it claims, in the School Report of 1877, to have given, on an average, four and a half months’ tuition to 117,843 children, at an average monthly cost of $1.43 per month, and at a total cost to the State of $1,050,346. While the cost of administration of the old system was but $18,000, the expense of working the new has been $170,800! If we regarded the number of pupils alone, the old system did nearly half the work (54,232 children then, 117,843 now) for less than one-fifth the money! Look at that! $178,577 then, against $1,050,346 now. Then Virginia was rich; now she is poor. The cost of administration was then, absolutely, a little over one-tenth of what it is now; and relatively to the numbers taught, about one-fourth of the present.

An attempt will be made to break the terrible force of this comparison of facts by reviving the complaints which our Utopians used to utter against the incompleteness of our old system. The plea will be that, if the system was cheap, its fruits were very poor. We shall again hear the old complaints as to the great irregularity in attendance, the listlessness of parents and pupils, the scantiness of the letters actually gained, etc., etc., etc. But the answer is: First, that this imperfection of results, which was true of the old system, if it argues anything, argues the folly of the State’s attempting to cure in the popular masses the disease of ignorance, indolence and apathy, by any such quantum of the arts of letters as the State can give on any system. If the former results argue anything, they argue the just application to the whole subject of the Maxim, “One man can take a horse to water, but a hundred cannot make him drink”: they only show what we have all along urged that to inspire aspiration, punctuality, industry, a conscientious use of privileges and acquirements, is what the State has no means of doing, and without these, any appliances, or any plan, are wasted.

But second, the answer is, that our new system, with all its tyranny and crushing expense, yields fruits just as imperfect. Were the children of the indigent then listless and irregular in attendance? They are so still. Was the tincture of letters then given very small? It is smaller now. The old system did not profess to deal with any but indigent white children. Of these, the Commonwealth then contained about 97,000; and of these, 54,232 were not only enrolled, but actually sent to school. Our present system undertakes to provide for 482,789 children and youths. Of these, it has not enrolled even more than 205,000, and it only pretends to have taught, at all, 117,843. Talk of imperfect results! The old system was energy and perfection compared with this! The old system had so far overtaken its destined work as to give nearly three months’ schooling to more than half the whole mass of youth for which it was designed; while the new system has not enrolled nearly half of its appointed mass, and has not given any instruction to three-fourths of its appointed charge. Even as to the enrolled youth, we have a betrayal of its inefficiency, and of the abounding listlessness and irregularity of its beneficiaries. The present law makes the compensation of the teachers depend on the actual attendance, rather than the numbers claimed on the school-rolls. The law says that a teacher shall not be maintained, unless an actual average of sixteen daily is in attendance. Now, it is very well known among the teachers, that, unless they have a roll of not less than thirty pupils, it is usually vain to hope for an actual attendance of sixteen. What does this mean? That on any average day, when sixteen are in place long enough to be counted, fourteen are truant. That tells the whole tale as to the wretched results of our present organization. Dr. Ruffner’s figures tell the same miserable story. Of all the youth of school age, only 24.4 per cent. attend school on an average; and of those enrolled, only 57 1/2 per cent. attend. (In round numbers, 205,000 are enrolled; 118,000 have attended. Now as 118,000 : 205,000 :: 57 1/2 : 100.)

I have now shown our legislators two plans the Georgian, and the Old plan of Virginia both of which have been tried, and either of which is immeasurably better than the one that curses us. This system of our fathers had superiority in its principles, as great as in its practical workings. Of these, I will, in concluding, present two. One was, that the State government left to parents those powers and rights which are theirs by the laws of God and nature, and which cannot be usurped by a just, free government: those of directing the rearing of their own children, and choosing its agents and methods. Clusters of parents were left to create schools, to elect teachers, to ordain the instruction and discipline. When the parents had used their prerogatives, then the State came in as a modest ally and assistant, and by providing for the teaching in those schools of such children as their helpless poverty made proper wards of the State’s charity, helped on the work of education, and supplied that destitution which private charity did not reach. There was a system conformed to the good old doctrine of our fathers, that “governments are the servants of the people.” But the present plan proceeds on the doctrine of despots, that the people are the servants of the government. Parents are bidden to stand aside, and betray their rights and duties, while little State officials usurp their powers of creating schools, electing teachers, and ordaining methods.

The other was, that our wise fathers, by this simple plan, resolved the otherwise insoluble difficulty about the religion of the schools, which is now involving the friends of State education in the North and in Europe, in inexplicable entanglements. On the one hand, if the State is to act fairly and honestly up to her pledge to sever herself from the Church, she cannot inculcate one religion to the exclusion of the others. On the other hand, it is an Atheistic outrage on the Christians, who compose the larger part of the citizens, to intrude between them and their children, and then give them a godless , which, as we have seen, must be an ungodly education. We have again and again warned the advocates of the Yankee State theory, that the entanglement was insoluble, and that the practical result will surely be, that the attitude of our constitutions will enable the infidel party to triumph everywhere, to expel the Bible and Christianity from all the schools, and to rear us (so far as State schools go) a generation of Atheists. This is to be the practical issue of their misguided zeal the issue which is, in fact, rapidly establishing itself in the Northwest to-day. Now, all this difficulty was avoided by our fathers’ plan. The State, which knows no church in preference to another, did not elect the teachers; did not ordain their discipline or religious character. Parents have the right to do all these things in the lights of their own consciences and spiritual liberty, and the parents made the schools. No other solution will ever be found that is as good.

To Dr. Ruffner, Superintendent of Schools
18 April 1876
Repelling the Charge of Inconsistency; An Advocate of Universal Education, Provided it is True education; The Old Virginian Plan; School Houses and Jails; Educated Criminals; A Few Comparative Figures; Drenching and Drinking; Home Education

To W.H. Ruffner, Esq., Superintendent of State Schools:

Dear Sir: You have undesignedly done the cause of truth a service by so assailing the Virginia doctrines as advanced by me in the Southern Planter as to awaken the public curiosity to their defence. That defence I propose to continue in a brief reply to you by facts and arguments alone. I do not propose to follow you into any personalities. I am perfectly aware that my person is, to the people of Virginia, too unimportant for them to feel interested in a squabble over its consistency or credit. I presume that their feeling for your private person also is not very different. For an important principle they may care. While my humble sphere as a minister and teacher may render the great public indifferent to me personally, my employers and neighbors, who know me, need no defence of my personal credit from any disparagement from what quarter soever. They know that my position is thoroughly consistent and independent; that in my own education I never received from Church or State one dollar of eleemosynary aid; and that I have neither neglected nor abused any official trust committed to me.

You think it inconsistent in me to disapprove any free school because, you say, I am a professor in a “free school” a theological seminary. This seminary is indeed truly “a free school.” “I thank the Jew for that word.” Founded and sustained by the spontaneous, unforced gifts of good men, it gives free tuition in divinity to young men of all denominations even the most opposed to the donors seeking the ministry. It is honestly and really a “free school” supported by free gifts, attended by free, voluntary pupils. No penny of the salary of its teachers is exacted by the tax-gatherer from unwilling hands to pay for a project or an inculcation which they disapprove. Your “free schools,” like not a few of the other pretensions of Radicalism, are in fact exactly the opposite to the name falsely assumed. The great bulk of those who pay the money for them do it, not “freely,” but by compulsion. They are virtually thrust down our throats by the bayonet. And the exemplars you most boast and imitate not only make the payment compulsory, but the attendance also, as your consistency will doubtless cause you to do in Virginia also in a few years. The only freedom of your system is your freedom to compel other people’s money.

Your attacks on me breathe a great glorying in the strength of your party. Their tone seems to cry: “Oh, vain man; seest thou not that thou resistest the inevitable? With us are all Kaisers, and all demagogues , and all their minions , and all tax-gatherers, and all tax-consumers. Who art thou against so many?” Well, perhaps, nobody. But it is precisely in this that every prudent, reflecting Virginian sees the conclusive argument against your plan. Our true statesmen always taught us that government should not be allowed to go into any project aside from its direct, legitimate ends, especially if that project would subsidize many persons and create for them a motive of personal advantage to uphold it. Because whenever that project might be wrested to mischief, these interested motives might prevent a wholesome repeal. Such is precisely the case with your project. It has become mischievous and tyrannical, in that it forces on us the useless, impracticable, and dishonest attempt to teach literary arts to all negroes, when the State is unable to pay its debts and provide for its welfare, and has just been despoiled of its possessions by violence. And just so soon as a feeble voice is raised against this wrong, you flaunt before us this fact, that the vicious system has corrupted and subsidized so many minds that the friends of right are powerless! Why, this is the very demonstration that I am right. This is the crowning condemnation of your system.

You seem also to think I wrote with great severity. I did write with great severity in one sense. How came you to overlook the fact, which every dispassionate reader saw, that my severity was all aimed, not at Virginia, but at her conquerors and oppressors? Was it because you found yourself in fuller sympathy with those conquerors than with your oppressed fellow-citizens? Take heed, lest some, less your friends than I, should conclude so.

Notwithstanding your glorying, then, I mean once more to assert the unfashionable truth. Truth is never out of date. It has sometimes happened that a tentative experience has thrown so much light upon a bad system as to re-open the discussion with better guidance than the previous. If the American people, after enjoying this bepraised system, are so deficient in candor and intelligence that they cannot review and amend wrong action, this is sufficiently convictive of the worthlessness of the plan.

Let me also, at the outset, arrest all invidious outcry by saying that I am an advocate of the most universal education possible, provided it be true education. I heartily recognize all the teachings of the golden rule, of philanthropy, and of equality, (so far as equality is righteous), which prompt us to desire for all our fellow-creatures, so far as possible, all the advantages of culture we value for ourselves and that without distinguishing against classes. Let me say, once for all, I am an advocate for the State’s providing, if necessary, all the aid for poor children’s schooling which is really desirable and will be really utilized by them that is, UPON THE OLD VIRGINIA PLAN. I wish to satisfy the most overweening by the express admission that universal education would be a good thing, were it practicable. The argument is that under the providential order which God has imposed upon society, the effectual literary education of all is impossible, and therefore the promise of it is delusive and mischievous, and that when the State is an American democracy, especially, it is no safe or suitable agent for doing the work.

We begin by reasserting the familiar objection, so often contemptuously dismissed, that the principle upon which the State intrudes into the parental obligation and function of educating all children, is dangerous and agrarian. It is the teaching of the Bible and of sound political ethics that the education of children belongs to the sphere of the family and is the duty of the parents. The theory that the children of the Commonwealth are the charge of the Commonwealth is a pagan one, derived from the heathen Sparta and Plato’s heathen republic , and connected by regular, logical sequence with legalized prostitution and the dissolution of the conjugal tie. The dispensation of Divine Providence determines the social grade and the culture of children on their reaching adult age by the diligence and faithfulness of their parents, just as the pecuniary condition of children at that epoch is determined. The desire of procuring for their children a desirable condition in all these respects is the grand stimulus which Providence has provided for the efforts of parents. It is His ordination that youth shall inherit the status provided for them by their parents, and improve it by their own exertions as aided by the Christian philanthropy of their fellow-men. Now, by what apology does the State (not an evangelical, nor an eleemosynary institute by its nature) justify itself in stepping in to revolutionize that order? By the plea that it (the State) is so vitally interested in the intelligence of the citizens that this entitles her to take effectual means for preventing their ignorance. See, now, whither this assumption leads. The morality of the citizens is far more essential to the welfare of the State; and the only effectual basis for morals is the Christian religion. Therefore the State would be yet more bound to take order that all youth be taught Christianity. And this is just the argument by which Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Gladstone (before his political somersaults began) strenuously defended church establishments. Again, physical destitution of the citizen is as dangerous to the State as ignorance; therefore the State would be entitled to interfere for her own protection and repair that calamitous condition of destitution which their own and their parents’ vices and laziness have entailed on a part of the people, by confiscating, for their relief, the honestly earned property of the virtuous and thrifty and their children. The last two inferences are precisely as fair as the first. Principles always bear their fruits; and the friends of this principle will in due time become consistent, and claim at least the last inference, along with the first. They are not likely to adopt the second, because the culture and ethics of the “common school” will leave them, after a time, too corrupt and atheistic to recognize the value of morality or its source The Christian religion.

We often hear this apology for the State’s wholesale intrusion into education advanced with the exactness of a commercial transaction. They say: “It costs less money to build school-houses than jails.” But what if it turns out that the State’s expenditure in schools-house is one of the things which necessitates the expenditure in jails? The fruits of the system show that such is the result, and hence the plea of the State’s intrusion is utterly delusive. The regular result of the kind of education which alone it can give is to propagate crime. Allison’s History of Europe states that forty years ago two-thirds of the inhabitants of France could neither read nor write. In Prussia, at the same time, the government had made secular education almost universal, by compelling parents to send their children to school from seven to fourteen years of age. Statistics of the two countries show that serious crime was at that time fourteen times as prevalent in intelligent Prussia as in Ignorant France Vol V., page 15. Again it has been found from the official records of the 86 departments of France that the amount of crime has, without a single exception, been in proportion to the amount of scholastic instruction given in each. Again, we are told that much the largest number of the lewd women of Paris come from those departments where there is most instruction. In Scotland the educated criminals are to the uneducated as four and a half to one. M. De Toqueville remarked of the United States that crime increased most rapidly where there was most instruction. The ancients testify that the moral condition of the “Barbarians” was comparatively pure beside that of the Greeks and Romans, and that the most refined cities were the most corrupt. But let us bring the comparison nearer home. The Northern States of the Union had previously to the war all adopted the system of universal State schools and the Southern States had not. In 1850 the former had thirteen and a half millions of people, and twenty three thousand six hundred and sixty-four criminal convictions. The South (without State schools) had nine and a half millions, and two thousand nine hundred and twenty-one criminal convictions that is to say, after allowing for the difference of population, the “educated” masses were something more than six times as criminal as the “uneducated”. The same year the North was supporting 114,700 paupers, and the South 20,500. The “unintelligent” South was something more than four times as well qualified to provide for its own subsistence as the “intelligent” North! But Massachusetts is the native home of the public school in America. In Boston and its adjacent county the persons in jails, houses of correction or refuge, and in alms-houses bore among the whites the ratio of one to every thirty-four. (Among the wretched, free blacks it was one to every sixteen) In Richmond, the capital of “benighted” Virginia, the same unhappy classes bore the ratio of one to every one hundred and twelve. Such are the lessons of fact. Indeed, it requires only the simplest ocular inspection to convince any observer that the economical plea for the State schools is illusory. In the South State school-houses were unknown, and consequently jails and penitentiaries were on the most confined and humble scale. the North is studded over with grand and costly public school-houses, and her jails are even more “palatial” in extent and more numerous than they.

All such promiscuous efforts to educate the whole masses by any secular authority must disappoint our hopes, and result in mischief, for a second reason. It finds its illustration in the homely proverb, that “while one man may lead a horse to water a hundred cannot make him drink.” True education, taken in any extent of its meaning, broad or narrow, is so greatly a moral process that a certain amount of aspiration and desire in its subject is an absolute prerequisite. The horse may be drenched, but that is not drinking; and the drench is not nourishment to be assimilated, but medicine. So a knowledge of letters may be “exhibited” (as the medical men phrase it) to the resisting or apathetic mind; but there is no assimilation of the mental pabulum and no recruitment of spiritual strength. Something else must be first done, then, besides building and equipping a school for souls which are in this State; and that is something which the State can never do at least not by its schools. The moral aspiration and virtuous aims must be present, which alone will utilize a knowledge of letters. This is very plain. Now, it will be found generally true that in this country it is precisely the children of those who are presumed to need State education, and for whom the provision is chiefly designed, who are in this unprepared condition. If the State contained no children save those of parents who had the intelligence, the virtue, the aspiration, and also the property, or else the industry, which would make them resolved and able to educate their own, then, of course, it would be wholly superfluous for the Government to interfere. But these are the only children to whom letters are, in the general a real means of culture or elevation. Separate those who, in our fruitful land have neither aspiration, nor industry, nor property enough to insure that they will educate their own children, and in those children we usually find precisely that apathetic and hopeless condition, which renders this means nugatory, or worse. The parents are the real architects of their children’s destiny, and the State cannot help it. There are, of course, exceptions. There are meritorious parents reduced by exceptional calamities to destitution, and there are a few “rough diamonds” unearthed in the unlikely mines of groveling families. Such exceptions should be provided for; but wise legislators do not make universal systems to reach exceptional cases.

The law which we assert is accounted for by several practical causes. Parents who remain too poor and callous to educate their own children are so because they are ignorant, indolent, unaspiring, and vicious. The children’s characters are usually as much the progeny of the parents as their bodies. Again: The aspiration, virtuous desire, and energy of the parents are absolutely essential to supply that impulse, which the child’s mind requires to overrule its youthful heedlessness, and to impel it to employ and assimilate its otherwise useless acquisitions. And once more: The home education has so much more potential than that of the school, that the little modicum of training which a “common-school” system can give to the average masses is utterly trivial and impotent as a means of reversing the child’s tendency. That which costs nothing is never valued. Old Judge Buell, of Albany, placed a sack of a new variety of beautiful wheat upon the counter of the pavilion at a great agricultural fair, with a label inviting every farmer to take one quart as a gratuity, for seed. At night the sack was almost untouched. The old gentleman fretted at this result, took it the second day to the booth of a seeds man, and directed him to sell it at two dollars per quart. It was at once bought up greedily. One of the best teachers we ever knew determined to devote his latter years to the philanthropic work of teaching a gratuitous school for his neighbors. In a few months it had dwindled to five pupils, and died a natural death within a year. There is a natural humiliation also in being compelled to accept the provision of charity, or of the State, for that which conscience tells parents is obligatory upon them. These reasons account for the fact, which the advocates of public schools so desire to hide, that the children do not attend, and the parents do not care to make them attend. He who goes “behind the scenes” in the Northern States knows how extensively this is true. The rising movement for a “compulsory education” is a confession of this fact. The unwilling disclosure of the failure of the system is the only thing this new movement will effect; for its folly is clear from this simple thought, that it contravenes, worse than all, the axiom: “One man can lead the horse to water,” etc. Hence it results, that the class which is low enough to need this State aid, is one which usually cannot be elevated by it. But the abortive effort will awaken other influences, as we shall see, which are likely to make the children more miserable and less innocent than their ignorant parents.

Must the philanthropist, then, submit to the conclusion that ignorance and its consequences must needs be hereditary, and that knowledge, culture, and virtue are not to be extended beyond the fortunate youth for whom their parents secure them? We reply: this sad law does hold, and must hold to a far wider extent than our over-weening zeal is willing to acknowledge. Yet its rigor may be relaxed but not by the meddling of the civil magistrate or the arm of legislation. The agency must be social and Christian. The work must be done by laying hold of the sentiments, hearts, and consciences of parents and children together not through their grammatical and arithmetical faculties. The agents for this blessed work are the neighbor and the church. Christian charity and zeal, with the potent social influences descending from superiors to inferiors, in a society which is practically a kindly and liberal aristocracy; these may break the reign of ignorance and unaspiring apathy. The State cannot; the work is above its sphere.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
R.L. DABNEY
22 April 1876

Universal Education as Involving the Idea of the Leveller; All cannot Aspire to the Highest Stations; Manual Labor or Savagery the Destiny of the Major Part; Fancy Philanthropists; The Common School Alumni; Theological Quacks; A Little Learning a Dangerous Thing

To W. H. Ruffner, Esq., Superintendent of State Schools:

Dear Sir. In the third place this theory of universal education in letters by the State involves the absurd and impossible idea of the Leveller , as though it were possible for all men to have equal destinies in human society. It is a favorite proposition with the asserters of these so-called American ideas, that “every American boy should improve himself as though he might some day be President of the United States.” That is to say, the system supposes and fosters a universal discontent with the allotments of Providence, and the inevitable graduations of rank, possessions and privilege. It is too obvious to need many words, that this temper is anti-Christian; the Bible, in its whole tone, inculcates the opposite spirit of modest contentment with our sphere, and directs the honorable aspiration of the good man to the faithful performance of its duties, rather than to the ambitious purpose to get out of it and above it. It may be asked, does not the Bible recognize that fact, so pleasing to every generous mind, that the lower ranks now and then produce a youth worthy of the highest? Yes, David was taken from the sheep-folds to be Israel’s most glorious king. But the Bible-idea is (as David’s was a case precisely in point) that the humble boy is to exhibit this fitness for a nobler destiny, not by discontent and greedy cravings, but by his exemplary performances in his lower lot; and that Providence and his fellow-citizens are to call him to “come up higher.” For these instances of native merit, which are usually few, the State has no need to legislate. They will rise of themselves. They cannot be kept down, provided only we do not legislate against them, but leave them the carriere euverte aux talents; or, if they will be the better for any provision, it should be exceptional, as they are exceptional cases.

With this exception, it is utterly false that every American boy may aspire to the higher stations of life. In the lottery of life these prizes must be relatively few only a few can reach them. Nor is it right or practicable to give to all boys an “even start” in the race for them. The State, of course, should not legislate to the disadvantage of any in this race; but we mean that Providence, social laws, and parental virtues and efforts, do inevitably legislate in favor of some classes of boys in their start in that race, and if the State undertakes to countervail that legislation of nature by leveling action, the attempt is wicked, mischievous, and futile. The larger part of every civilized people is, and ever will be, addicted to regular, manual labor. The idea that the diffusion of intelligence and improvement of the arts are so to lighten the doom of labor, that two or three hours’ work daily will provide for the wants of all, and leave the lowest laborer the larger part of his day for intellectual pursuits, is a preposterous dream. Let experience decide. Does the progress of modern civilization tend to exact “shorter hours” of its laborers than the barbarous state? Human desires always outrun human means. If this Utopian era is ever come, when two or three hours of the artisan’s time will be worth a day’s work, the artificial wants of him and his family will have outrun him, in demanding the expenditure of five or six days’ wages in one. The laborer will still find a motive for working all day as now unless he turn loafer! And the last words remind us, that the inexorable law of nature we have just pointed out is, on the whole, a beneficent one; for it is necessary to prevent mankind from abusing their leisure. The leisure conferred by wealth is now often abused. So would that secured for the poor, by this fancied wealth of intelligence, be yet more abused; and the six or eight hours redeemed from manual toil would be devoted, not to intellectual pursuits, but to wasteful and degrading vices. And these vices would soon rivet again the yoke of constant labor upon their necks, or the fetters of the jail or house of correction. We repeat: The destiny of the major part of the human family is the alternative of manual labor or savagery.

Now, no people will ever connect a real pursuit of mental culture with the lot of constant manual labor. The two are incompatible. Neither time, nor taste, nor strength, nor energy of brain will be found for both. Have not all manual-labor schools been failures? The man that works all day (usually) does not study. The nerve-force has been expended in the muscles, and none is left for mental effort. Hence, we care not how universally the State may force the arts of penmanship and reading on the children of laborers, when these become laboring men they will cease to read and write; they will practically disuse the arts as cumbersome and superfluous. This is a fact at which your enthusiast for common schools is very loath to look; but it is a stubborn one. The laboring classes in States which profess to give a universal education do not make any more beneficial use of letters, than the elsewhere. Prussia has for more than a generation compelled all her peasantry to go to school; but she is full of middle-aged peasants who have forgotten how to read, and who, in fact, never read. In boasted Massachusetts herself the very superintendents of the free schools lament that the State has more than ever of laboring poor, especially among the agricultural laborers, who neither know nor care anything concerning letters, for themselves or their children. The deniers of these stubborn facts are only the flatterers, not the friends, of the laborers.

Again our fancy-philanthropist will raise his out-cry, that if these views are admitted they condemn more than half of our fellow-creatures to a Boeotian stupidity and mental darkness. We might answer, first, that his expedients are futile to reverse that doom. The only difference between him and us is, that he is too quixotic , or uncandid, or interested to admit the fact. God has made a social sub-soil to the top-soil, a social foundation in the dust, for the superstructure the utopian cannot unmake it, least of all by his patchwork. But there is a second answer; he forgets that the use of letters is not education, but only one means of education, and not the only means. The laboring classes find their appropriate mental and moral cultivation in their tasks themselves, and in the example and influence of superiors for whom they labor. The plough-man or artisan cultivates his mental faculties most appropriately in acquiring skill and resource for his work. He trains the moral virtues by the fidelity and endurance with which he performs that work. He ennobles his taste and sentiments by looking up to the superior who employs him. If to these influences you add the awakening, elevating, expanding force of Christian principles, you have given that laborer a true education a hundred fold more true, more suitable, more useful, than the communication of certain literary arts, which he will almost necessarily disuse. Let the reader recall that brilliant passage of Macaulay, as just as brilliant, in which he shows, against Dr. Johnson, that the Athenian populace, without books, was a highly-cultivated people. Let him remember how entirely the greatness of the feudal barons in the middle ages, was dissociated from all “clerky arts;” yet they were warriors, statesmen, poets, and gentlemen. So, our own country presents an humbler instance in the more respectable of the African freedmen. Tens of thousands of these, ignorant of letters, but trained to practical skill, thought, and resource, by intelligent masters, and imitating their superior breeding and sentiments, present, in every aspect, a far “higher style of man” than your Yankee laborer from his common school, with his shallow smattering and purblind conceit, and his wretched newspaper stuffed with moral garbage from the police-courts, and with false and poisonous heresies in politics and religion. Put such a man in the same arena with the Southern slave from a respectable plantation, and in one week’s time the ascendancy of the Negro, in self-respect, courage, breeding, prowess and practical intelligence, will assert itself palpably to the Yankee and to all spectators. The slave was, in fact, the educated man.

Let it be granted, as we have just implied, that there is a certain use which this alumnus of the common school may continue to make of his knowledge of letters. This gives us our strongest argument. Then the common schools will have created a numerous “public” of readers one-quarter or one-tenth cultivated; and the sure result will be the production for their use of a false, shallow, sciolist literature, science, and theology, infinitely worse than blank ignorance. “Wheresoever the carcass is, thither will the eagles be gathered together.” This will be the sure result of the law of supply and demand inspired by a mercenary spirit. Formerly literature was for the educated; it was their occupation, and they formed the constituency for whom the producers of literature labored; consequently the literature of the civilized nations was characterized by all that was most decent in manner, elevated in sentiment, and thorough and just in argument, of which their society could boast. The uneducated or quarter-educated formed no direct constituency for authors and publishers; they did not bid for them, or cater to them. These unlettered classes received their ideas of literary, political, philosophical, and theological subjects, (the most ignorant virtually have their politics, philosophy, and theology), from their social superiors, through social channels. and this was a source much safer than the present “literature for the millions,” because much higher, purer, and more disinterested. The consequence was, that the unlettered classes reflected the opinions, sentiments, and elevated tone of the uppermost stratum; now it is those of a class lower and more sordid than themselves. Thus the Southern overseer, who read little but his Bible, had a judgment infinitely better trained, a moral tone far higher, and a social political, and religious creed far sounder than the modern alumnus of your “common school,” with his Leveller’s arrogance and envy, and his armful of cheap newspapers. The overseer had the landed gentry who employed him as his instructors and models, and through them drew his speculative opinions from the noblest minds of the South; the Crawfords, Cheves, Madisons, Barbours, Randolphs, Calhouns. The common-school alumnus has the wretched sciolist and theological quacks, who drive their sordid trade in cheap periodical literature. The advocates of the Yankee system boast in it, and revile the old one in that the latter made the letters the prerogative of the few; theirs of the many. But letters of what sort? Here we have “given them a Roland for their Oliver”.

We appeal to facts. Has not the creation of this large reading (but not truly educated) public occasioned a flood of mischievous, heretical, sciolistic, corrupting literature? The result is that the book and newspaper-making trade has, for sordid purposes, brought down to the lower classes a multitude of speculations on the most dangerous subjects, with which no mind is prepared to deal for itself and independently, until it is very thoroughly trained and informed. That thorough mental discipline and full learning the common schools can never give to these masses. They may as well promise that every agrarian among them shall be an Astor or a Rothschild in wealth. The state of European and Yankee society under this new impulse illustrates the facts we assert. The smattering which State education has given the masses has but been to them the opening of a Pandora’s box. It has only launched them in an ocean which they are incompetent to navigate. Every manufactory is converted into a debating club, where the operatives intoxicate their minds with the most licentious vagaries of opinions upon every fundamental subject of politics and religion; and they have only knowledge enough to run into danger, without having a tenth part of the knowledge necessary to teach them their danger and incompetency. It was this system which prepared the way for the “International Society,” and the horrors of the Paris Commune. So far are these nations from being healthily illuminated, they are an easy prey to the most destructive heresies, social and religious; and their condition is far more unwholesome and volcanic, with a more terrifying prospect of social dissolution, anarchy, and blood-shed, than was ever presented by the ignorance of the “middle ages”. So obvious was this tendency to thoughtful minds thirty-five years ago that the great historian Heerea, with his intimate acquaintance with all the defects of mediaeval society, announced the deliberate opinion that the art of printing was destined to be more a curse than a blessing to Europe. It is not necessary for us to espouse that opinion; here is, at least, a fair instance for the application of the maxim of Pope, now so universally and disdainfully ignored:

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
For shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
But drinking deeply sobers us again.”

The amount of this grave objection is that when the State interferes in the work of common school education, it inevitably does not enough, or too much. To give that large learning and thorough discipline necessary for setting the mind to deal independently with the corrupt labyrinth of modern current opinion is beyond the State’s power. What she does give usually prepares the victims for the literary seducers.

It is one of the most important and best established maxims of social science that influence descends. Hence, if you would permeate the whole popular mass with any wholesale influence, the wisest plan is to place the element of good at the top, that it may percolate downwards. The engineer, when he wishes to supply the humblest, lowliest lane or alley of a city with pure water, establishes his reservoir upon the topmost hill; and thence it descends, without any other force than its own gravity, to every door and every lip. So the most effectual, the most truly philanthropic mode of elevating the lower classes of society is to provide for the rise of the superior class. This is nature’s process; she elevates the whole mass by lifting it from above so that all the parts rise together, preserving that relation of places on whose preservation the whole organism depends. The fashionable plan is to place the lever under the bottom stones and prize them to the level of the cap-stones of which the result is that the whole structure tumbles into rubbish. The establishment of the University of Virginia for giving the most thorough training to advanced scholars has been the most truly liberal measure for the cultivation of the masses ever adopted in the State. It teaches only a few hundred of young men, and those only in the highest studies? True, but in giving them a higher standard of acquirement it has elevated as well as multiplied all the teachers of every grade; making the instruction better, down to the primary schools where the children of the poor learn the rudiments of reading. And what is better still, it has made thorough culture respectable, and diffused honest aspirations to the lowest ranks.

Your very obedient servant,
R. L. DABNEY

25 April 1876
Overweening Philanthropists; Decent and Vile Children; The Danger of Disease; What Dr. Dabney Thinks of Southern Negroes as Compared with Northern Poor Whites; Demagogues and Politicians and Their Relation to the Free School System; The Testimony of Webster, Not the Dictionary Man; An Alternative Horrible to Contemplate

To W. H. Ruffner, Esq., Superintendent of State Schools:
Dear Sir. In the objections thus far set forth there are premises which, however true and impregnable, are now so unfashionable that with many they will meet no response but an angry outcry. The application of them would demolish so many vain idols, now much cherished, that the writer cannot hope for a hearing even, from many minds. Time must be the only teacher for these overweening philanthropists. When they are taught by him that this system of State education has utterly failed to produce the benefits they designed, and has fixed on us the mischiefs above described, they will learn that these are the words of truth and soberness. But we purpose to present three other points of objection not involving the principles expounded in the previous part of this discussion, more practical and indisputable; and either one of these is sufficient for the utter condemnation of the system.

The first is, that if a system of universal common schools is to be carried out in good faith, there must be a mixture of the children of the decent and the children of the vile in the same society during the most plastic age. The boast is; that the education is to be for all, and most prominently for the lowest and most ignorant, because they need it most. Then, if this boast is to be faithfully realized, all the moral lepers among the children of a given district must be thrust into the society of our children at school. In order to receive the shallow modicum of letters there dispensed, they must be daily brought into personal contact with the cutaneous and other diseases, the vermin (Yes, dear reader, it is disgusting! We would spare you if faithfulness permitted; but the foulness belongs to the plan, not to us) the obscenity, the profanity, the groveling sentiments, the violence of the gamins , with which our boasted material civilization teems in its more populous places. This must be done, too, at the tender and imitative age of childhood. The high, sacred prerogative of the virtuous parent to choose the moral influences for his own beloved offspring must be sacrificed to this ruthless, levelling idol. Every experienced teacher knows that pupils educate each other more than he educates them. The thousand nameless influences literary, social, moral, not only of the play-ground but of the school-room, the whispered conversation, the clandestine note, the sly grimace, the sly pinch, the good or bad recitation, mould the plastic character of children far more than the most faithful teacher’s hand.

Now, there are some quarters of our towns and cities, and some rural neighborhoods, where this difficulty is little felt; either because the limited population is nearly homogeneous, or because the poor are decent and virtuous. Especially has the latter case been realized in many country communities of the South, where such was the cleanliness, propriety, good breeding, and moral elevation of the poorer families, imbibed from their kindly dependence on cultivated superiors, that a neighborhood school could be made to include all the white children, without serious injury to the morals of any. But the levelling policy, of which State common schools are a constituent member, now claims to make the blacks equal, socially and politically, to the most reputable whites. Against the collection of white children into the same public schools with Negroes, the very principle which we are illustrating has made a protest so indignant and determined that, although the protest of the conquered, it has been heard in all the Southern States, except Louisiana. The refusal to hear it there resulted in the absolute banishment of the children of the white citizens from the schools supported by their money. And this protest has not been, as the enemy and conqueror deems it, the mere expression of caste-prejudice, but the conscientious demand of the natural right to (protect) our children from moral contamination. Here, then, we have a broad, a recognized application of this potent objection to the State system. The whole Southern people make the objection; nearly all the friends of State education admit its force in this case. But on this conceded case there are two remarks to be made. First, the concession is inconsistent with the whole theory of State schools and of the levelling system to which they belong. This is so clearly felt, that even now the determined advocates of State education are candid enough to foreshadow the withdrawal of the concession, speaking of it as an arrangement “necessary for the time-being”. Is it your opinion that this concession should be yielded to us temporarily or permanently? Do you think that it should be withdrawn after a little, when all the staunch old Confederates like me have died out; or that the Negroes should never be admitted to the same schools as the whites? Yankeedom and Negrodom are listening for your answer. Second. The Southern Negroes are a less degraded and vicious race than many large elements of the white poor, who, in parts of the North, have free entrance into the common schools there. Indeed, the force of the social objection is felt and acted on by numbers of the Northern people. Many are the blatant advocates of the system among the people of property, who yet dream not of sending their own children to the common schools. They consult their popularity by pretending to advocate the system; and yet, for their own offspring, they will not so much as touch it with a tip of their fingers. And many are the Pharisaic negrophobists who berate and revile the Southern people for resisting this abhorrent amalgamation of their children with blacks; who would flout with foul scorn the proposal to send their own pampered brats to the common school near them along with the children of their poor white neighbors.

Sometimes it is asked, “How are the degraded classes to be elevated if they are thus to be denied all association with those better than themselves?” We reply that while we fully recognize the Christian duty of seeking the degraded and of drawing them up to purer associations, we beg leave to demure against employing our innocent and inexperienced children as the missionaries. The braving of this moral contagion is the proper work of mature men and women of virtue; and these are to elevate their beneficiaries by holding to them the relation of benevolent superiors, not of comrades and equals in school-room and play-ground. It is claimed that it is the teacher’s part to prevent those “evil communications which corrupt good manners.” We reply that it is impossible; he would need more than the hundred hands of Briareus and the hundred eyes of Argus , with more moral fidelity than falls to the share of any save apostles and martyrs. Is the pittance paid to a common-school teacher likely to purchase all these splendid endowments? It is said that if a fastidious parent does not like the social atmosphere of the common school he may pay for a more select private one. But he is taxed compulsorily to support this school which parental duty forbids him to use; so that the system in this case amounts to an iniquitous penalty upon him for his faithfulness to his conscience. What clearer instance of persecution could arise? Once more it is sneeringly asked: “Have children’s morals never been corrupted in private schools?” They have, alas, often been. But this only shows our argument stronger instead of weaker; for it proves that parental vigilance as to the moral atmosphere of the children’s comrades needs to be greatly increased; while this system insists upon extinguishing all such conscientious watchfulness, and provides the punishment of a mulct for it’s exercise.

The second objection is yet more damning as against the system of State schools in this country. They are, and will inevitably be, wielded by the demagogues, who are in power for the time, in the interests of their faction. Here is a danger and a curse which must not be estimated by the results of the system in any other country, such as Scotland or Prussia. In the former kingdom the Presbyterian system of parochial schools gave what was virtually a national primary education. But it was not obnoxious to this perversion to factious uses. Scotland is a little country, and was then almost absolutely homogeneous in religion and politics; the government was a stable, hereditary monarchy, of the change of which there was neither possibility nor desire; the schools were controlled by the parish clergy and kirk sessions, parties whose attitude was at once independent, and dissociated from political objects and managers. In Prussia, also, we see a permanent military monarchy ruling the people with a uniformity and resistless power which has hitherto left no hope to the demagogue. It is very true that this monarchy does manipulate the State schools in the interest of its own perpetuity, and in doing so inflicts on the minds of the people no little injury. But the wrong thus done is as white as snow compared with pitch, when set against the foul perversions wrought by our demagogues in power. For an old, stable monarchy is always infinitely more decent and moderate than a democratic faction in America rioting on the spoils of party success. The teachings of the monarchy, if self-interested, are at least conservative and consistent; and they include a respectable knowledge of the Christian religion. It will be utterly delusive, therefore, to argue for the value of State common schools from Scotland or Prussia. Our demagogues will take effectual care that our schools shall not yield us even the mixed fruits which those nations have reaped from theirs.

For what is it on which American politicians do not lay their harpy hands to get or to keep the spoils of office? On the offices themselves, which the law has instituted for the public service; on finance; on commerce; on the railroads; on the productive industries of the citizens; on taxation; on our holy religion itself! And, like the harpies, whatever they touch they contaminate! That the school system of the States is perverted to factions and sordid ends is so notorious that we shall not insult the intelligence of our readers by many testimonies. Has not the supreme official of the school system in the State of Indiana, for instance, been seen to publish to the world his unblushing boast that he had successfully arrested the whole machinery to inculcate upon all the children of that State the malignant and lying creed of Radicalism? And this man, after satisfying his masters, the Radical legislature, of his success in placing the gospel of hate and murder, and these utter falsifications of history and fact and constitutional law, in the tender hand of every child in Indiana, only intimates, in the most gingerly and apologetic way, a faint inclination to give them the Word of God: which yet, he hastens to assure them, he had not presumed to attempt! Again, these omnipotent school boards, under the plausible pretext of uniformity of text-books, enter into alliances with capitalists who are publishers of books, (for what sordid consideration, who can tell?), giving them the monopoly of manufacturing American history, ethics and politics for the children of a whole State, without leaving any option to the parent. The single feature, presented by the alliance of the “Book-Trade” with the Education Boards, is sufficient to condemn the whole in the judgment of every independent mind. If it is not corrected the liberty of the citizens is gone. In some of those Southern States where the Conservatives have been so fortunate as to retain control of the State governments the advocates of State education are openly heard attempting, in their new-born zeal, to reconcile the people to the measure forced upon them by promising that it shall be so manipulated as to train the next generation of negroes to vote with the Conservatives. Now the temptation of the oppressed to foil their oppressors may be very strong; and they may be inclined to be rather unscrupulous in the means of defense against enemies so unscrupulous and abhorred as the carpet-bag horde. It may be very alluring to us to employ this tyrannical system, which is forced upon us against our will, to the ruin of its inventors, and thus to “hoist the engineer with his own petard .” But the foreseeing man cannot but remember that is a dangerous force which is employed, and that on any change of the faction in power what we hope to make sauce to the (Radical) goose may become sauce to the (Conservative) gander. It is a hazardous game for good people to attempt to “fight the devil with fire.”

This perversion of a pretended system of education is as intolerable as it is certain. It is hard enough to have a triumphant faction rule us in a mode which outrages our sense of equity and patriotism shall they also abuse their power to poison the minds of our own children against the principles which we honor, and to infect them with the errors which we detest? Is it not enough that our industries must all be burdened and our interests blighted by the selfish expedients of demagogues grasping after power and plunder? Must the very souls of our children be made merchandise and trafficked with in the same hateful cause? What freemen can endure it? These practices have already disclosed their destructive fruits in preparing a whole generation, by a pupilage of lies, for a war of plunder and subjugation against the South. For years before the war the sectional and aggressive party had control of the State education in New England and the Northwest. They used their opportunity diligently; and the result was that when the chance to strike came, they had a whole generation trained to their purpose in hatred of the South and in constitutional heresies. Such was the testimony of Daniel Webster. Two gentlemen from Virginia Old collegemates of mine were visiting Washington during Mr. Filmore’s administration. Webster’s return towards an impartial course had then gained him some respect in the South, and my two friends paid their respects to him. While conversing with them he fixed his dark eyes on them, and with great earnestness asked: “Can’t you Southern gentlemen consent, upon some sort of inducement or plan, to surrender slavery?” They replied firmly: “Not to the interference or dictation of the Federal Government. And this not on account of mercenary or selfish motives, but because to allow outside interference in this vital matter would forfeit the liberties and other rights of the South.” “Are you fixed in that?” asked Webster. “Yes, unalterably.” “Well,” he said, with an awful solemnity, “I cannot say you are wrong, but if you are fixed in that, go home and get ready your weapons.” They asked him what on earth he meant. He replied, that the parsons and common-school teachers and school-marms had diligently educated the whole Northern generation into a passionate hatred of slavery, who would, as certainly as destiny, attack Southern institutions. So that if Southern men were determined not to surrender their institutions they had better prepare for war. Thus, according to Mr. Webster, the crimes, woes, and horrors of the last fifteen years are all partly due to this school system. The only condition in which free government can exist is amidst the wholesome competition of two great constitutional parties, who watch and restrain each other. The result of this system of State schools is that the successful party extinguishes its rival, and thus secures for itself an unchecked career of usurpation. For it aims to extinguish all the diversity and independence which the young would derive from parental inculcation, and to imprint upon the whole body of coming citizens its own monotonous type of political heresies and passions. This is virtually done in America. For the Northern Democratic party is only a little less radical than the Radicals, and really separated from them chiefly by the craving for party spoils. If the triumphant faction, wielding this power of universal education, happens to one as able, patriotic, and honest as the party of Knox and Melville, then there may result the marvelous homogeneity and thrift of Presbyterian Scotland. But the ascendant faction may happen to be a ruthless and unprincipled Radicalism, armed with this power of universal corruption of future opinions and morals! And what then? All is lost; the remaining alternatives are Chinese civilization, or savagery.

Your very obedient servant,
R. L. DABNEY

4 May 1876
His Fourth Letter; The Bible in the Public Schools; The Difficulty not Limited to America; Is Religious Training Essential?; The Human Spirit a Monad; The Duty of Parents

To W. H. Ruffner, Esq., Superintendent of State Schools:
Dear Sir. The third objection to education by the State is, if possible, more conclusive still. It is one which looms up already in such insuperable dimensions that we freely acknowledge the hope that the whole system may be wrecked by it at an early day. This is the difficulty, especially for American Commonwealths, of the religious question. What religion shall be taught to the children by the State’s teachers as the necessary part of the education of reasonable and moral beings? We have only to mention the well-known facts that the citizens of these American States are conscientiously divided among many and rival sects of religion, and that our forms of government tolerate no union of Church and State, and guarantee equal rights to all men irrespective of their religious opinions, to show to any fair mind how impossible it is for the advocates of universal State education to do more than evade the point of the difficulty. It has been made familiar to every reader of the newspapers in America by recent events in this country in New York, in Cincinnati, and elsewhere. The teaching of King James’s version of the Christian scriptures even has led to violent protest and even to actual riot and combat. The most numerous and determined complainants are, of course, Roman Catholics ; but the Jews, now becoming increasingly numerous and influential, and the Unitarians and Deists must claim similar grounds of protest. Their argument is that this version of the Scriptures is, in their sincere judgment, erroneous; and therefore they cannot conscientiously permit it to be taught to their children. But as they are taxed to support these schools, they cannot be justly perverted to teach their children an obnoxious creed without a virtual establishment of the Protestant religion at public expense; which is an outrage against the fundamental principles and laws of the State. The special advocates of the common schools, who are usually also zealous Protestants, try hard to flout this objection as captious. But while we are very far from being Romanists in religion, we feel that this difficulty cannot be justly disposed of in this way. If the State, through its teachers, taught the children of us Protestants that version of the Bible which makes the Redeemer say; “Except ye do penance ye shall all likewise perish,” we should make a determined resistance. No power on earth would force us to acquiesce in such inculcation of what we devoutly believe to be religious error. And we should feel that it was an inexcusable injustice to tax us for the purpose of teaching to our beloved children what we could not, at the peril of our souls, permit them to learn. Now, the common-school advocates of New York and of Ohio would say, our objection is just, because the Latin vulgate is really an erroneous translation; the objection of the Romanists is unjust because King James’s is a substantially correct version of God’s word. As theologians, and in an ecclesiastical arena, we assert that this is true; and are confident that we can establish it. But this is not the point. We have covenanted that in our political relations as citizens of the Commonwealth, all shall have equal rights irrespective of their religion. In that sphere we are bound to be impartial; “our word is out.” The very point of the covenant is, that so far as civic rights and privileges go, our Romanist fellow-citizens’ opinions (erroneous though we deem them, in our religious judgment) shall be respected precisely as they are required to respect ours. The weight of the Romanist protest, then, cannot be consistently evaded by American republicans.

This difficulty is not limited to our democratic land. In Great Britain and Ireland, where the government is moving for national education, all the denominations of Christians are hopelessly involved in it. For the settlement of this matter, there are, if the State educates, but three possible alternatives. One is to force the religion of the majority on the children of the minority of the people. The injustice of this has already been proved. A second solution is what the British call the plan of “concurrent endowment.” It consists in aiding the citizens of different religions to gather their children in separate schools, in which religious instruction may be given suited to the views of the parents, and all paid for by the State alike. The clamors of the Romanists in New York have partially been appeased by acts falling virtually under this plan. The city government, in view of the fact that Romanists cannot conscientiously send their children to schools which they are taxed to support, make appropriations of public money to some of their schools, which are in every respect managed after their own religious ideas. This “concurrent endowment” is justly as odious to the great Protestant body, both in this country and Great Britain, as any plan could be. It offers its seeming solution only in places popular enough in the several rival religions to furnish materials for a school to each. In all other places it makes no provision for the difficulty. It is a dereliction from principle in a State prevalently Protestant in its population thus to place contradictory systems of belief upon a complete legislative equality, teaching both alike, when the truth of the one inevitably implies the falsehood of the other. It outrages the rights of Protestants by expending a part of the money they pay in propagating opinions which they regard as false and destructive, and it gives to erroneous creeds a pecuniary and moral support beyond that which they draw from the zeal and free gifts of their own votaries. For these reasons the plan of “concurrent endowment” is reprobated by all the stronger denominations on both sides of the Atlantic. The Irish and American Catholics profess to approve it, because they expect to gain something by it, but most inconsistently. Who dreams that if they held power, and were in the majority in either the British or Yankee empire, (as in the French), they would be willing to see “good Catholic money” appropriated by the State to teach “Protestant heresies?”

The third alternative proposed is, to limit the teaching of the State schools in every case to secular learning, leaving the parents to supply such religious instruction as they see fit in their own way and time, or to neglect it wholly. Of this solution no Christian of any name can be an advocate. We have seen how utterly the Pope and his prelates reprobate it. All other denominations in Europe regard it as monstrous; and indeed no adherent of any religion can be found in any other age or country than America who would not pronounce it wicked and absurd for any agency undertaking the education of youth to leave their religious culture an absolute blank. Testimonies might be cited to weariness; we will satisfy ourselves with a few, two of which are of peculiar relevancy, because drawn from unwilling witnesses, earnest advocates of State schools. In an annual meeting of the Teacher’s Association of the State of Maryland a well-considered piece was read by a prominent member, in which the immense difficulty of the religious question in State schools was fairly displayed. The author, on the one hand, admitted that the rights of conscience of parents could not be justly disregarded. He held, on the other, that a schooling devoid of moral and religious teachings ought to be utterly inadmissible. The best solution he could suggest was, that the State should get up a course of moral and theological dogmas for its pupils, embracing only those common truths in which all parties are agreed, and excluding every truth to which any one party took exception. And he admitted that, as we have Protestants, Papists, Unitarians, Jews, Deists, etc, (not to say Mormons and the heathen Chinese), the Bible and all its characteristic doctrines must be excluded! It is too plain that when the State school’s creed had been pruned of every proposition to which any one party objected, it would be worthless and odious in the eyes of every party and would be too emasculated to do any child’s soul a particle of good.

In a meeting of the Educational Association of Virginia four years ago a pious and admirable paper was read by one of the most eminent citizens in the State (Dr. J. B. Minor) on this theme: “Bible instruction in schools.” After some exordium it begins thus: “It must be acknowledged to be one of the most remarkable phenomena of our perverted humanity that among a Christian people, and in a Protestant land, such a discussion should not seem as absurd as to inquire whether school-rooms should be located under water, or in darksome caverns. The Jew, the Mohammedan, the follower of Confucius and of Brahma, each and all are careful to instruct the youth of their people in the tenets of the religions they profess, and are not content until, by direct and reiterated teaching, they have been made acquainted with at least the outline of the books which contain, as they believe, the revealed will of Deity. Whence comes it that Christians are so indifferent to a duty so obvious and so obviously recognized by Jew and Pagan?” The absolute necessity of Bible instruction in schools is then argued with irresistible force. Yet, with all this, such is the stress of the difficulty which we are pressing, it betrays this able writer into saying: “I do not propose to allude to the agitating question of the introduction of the Scriptures into public schools conducted under authority of government.” But why not? If other schools so imperatively need this element of Bible instruction, why do not the State schools? Its necessity is argued from principles which are of universal application to beings who have souls. Why shall not the application be made to all schools? Alas! the answer is: the right conclusion cannot be applied to State schools. We claim, then, this is a complete demonstration that the State is unfit to assume the educational function. The argument is as plain and perfect as any that can be imagined. Here is one part which is absolutely essential to the very work of right education: the State is effectively disabled from performing that part. Then, the State cannot educate, and should not profess it. The argument is parallel to this: In order to be a country physician it is essential that one shall ride in all weathers. A. cannot ride in bad weather. Then A. cannot be a country physician, and if he is an honest man he will not profess to be.

Whether the religious training is essential to all right education, let us hear a few more witnesses. Said Daniel Webster, in the Girard will-case, commenting on the exclusion of clergymen from the proposed orphan college: “In what age, by what sect, where, when, by whom, has religious truth been excluded from the education of youth? Nowhere; never. Everywhere, and at all times, it has been and is regarded as essential. It is of the essence, the vitality of useful instruction.” Says Sir Henry Bulwer: “I do not place much confidence in the philosopher who pretends that the knowledge which develops the passions is an instrument for their suppression, or that where there are the most desires there is likely to be the most order and the most abstinence in their gratification.” The historian Froude (a witness by no means friendly to orthodoxy), quoting Miss Nightingale, a philanthropist as Christian as wise, emphatically endorses her opinion, that the ordinary and natural effect of the communication of secular knowledge to youths whose destiny is labor is only to suggest the desire for illicit objects of enjoyment. Says Dr. Francis Wayland: “Intellectual cultivation may easily exist without the existence of virtue or love of right. In this case its only effect is to stimulate desire; and this unrestrained by the love of right must eventually overturn the social fabric which is at first erected.” Hear John Locke: “It is virtue, then, direct virtue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in education. If virtue and a well-tempered soul be not got and settled so as to keep out ill and vicious habits, languages, and science, and all the other accomplishments of education, will be to no purpose but to make the worse or more dangerous man.”

We propose now to substantiate these views of the wise and experienced, by arguing that tuition in Christianity is essential to all education which is worth the name. And we claim more than the admission that each man should at some stage of his training, and by somebody, be taught Christianity; we mean in the fullest sense that Christianity must be a present element of all the training at all times, or else it is not true and valuable education. Some one may say that this broad proposition is refuted at the outset by frequent instances of persons who received, at least during a part of their youth, a training perfectly non-Christian, and who yet are very useful, and even Christian citizens. The answer is easy: It is the prerogative of a merciful Providence, and the duty of His children, to repair the defects and misfortunes of His creatures and to bring good out of evil. But surely this comes far short of a justification for us if we willingly employ faulty methods which have a regular tendency to work evil. Surely it is not our privilege to make mischief for God and good Christians to repair!

Let the candid reader, then ponder the weight of these facts. The human spirit is a monad , a single, unit, spiritual substance, having facilities and susceptibilities for different modifications, but no parts. Hence, when it is educated it is educated as a unit. The moral judgments and acts of the soul all involve an exercise of reason; so that it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions. The conscience is the supreme, directive faculty of the soul; so that knowledge bears to moral action the relation of means to an end. Man fulfills the ends of his existence, not by right cognitions, but by right moral actions. Hence we are obviously correct in holding that the fundamental value of right cognitions is simply as they are the means of right moral acts that is, the knowledge is really valuable only as it is in order to right actions. Again: The nature of responsibility is such that there can be no neutrality, or tertium quid, between duty and sin. ‘He that is not with his God, is against Him’. He who does not positively comply with the ever-present obligation does ipso facto violate it, and contract positive sinfulness. Hence as there cannot be in any soul a non-Christian state which is not anti-Christian, it follows that any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian. God is the rightful, supreme master and owner of all reasonable creatures, and their nearest and highest duties are to him. Hence to train a soul away from him is a robbery of God, which he cannot justify in any person or agency whatsoever. He has not, indeed, committed to the State the duty of leading souls to him as its appropriate task. This is committed to the family and to his church. Yet it does by no means follow that the State may do anything tending to the opposite. The soul is essentially active, and every human being in his active powers of moral desire, volition and habit, is unavoidably exercising himself. Hence, whatever omission or neglect may be practiced as to the formation of a character, every character does inevitably form itself, for evil if not for good! Remember, also, that evil example is omnipresent in the world, and the disposition to respond to it is innate in every child. How obvious, then, that a “let-alone policy” as to the moral development must, to a greater or less degree, amount to a positive development of vicious character? Not to row is, itself, to float down the stream. Once more: the discipline of one set of faculties may leave other faculties inert and underdeveloped. This result is, then, more than a negative mischief, because the balance or proportion of the character is then more perverted. Should the branches and leaves of a tree continue to grow while the roots remained stationary it would result in the destruction of the tree, and this although the roots contracted no positive disease or weakness. The first gale would blow it over in consequence of the disproportion of its parts. In this view of the conclusion cited above from Sir H. Bulwer and Mr. Froude is seen to be perfectly just. With the increase of knowledge temptations much increase. Wider circles of imagined enjoyments are opened to the desires, so that if the virtuous habitude is not correspondingly strengthened, criminal wishes and purposes will be the sure result. He who has criminal purposes is, moreover, by his knowledge equipped with more power to execute them. Locke’s conclusion is just. In the words of Dr. Griffin, to educate the mind without purifying the heart is but “to place a sharp sword in the hand of a madman.” Our last proposition of these premises is that practically the Bible is the source and rule of moral obligation in this land. By this we do not mean to decide that even an atheist, not to say a disbeliever in inspiration, might not be still obliged from his principles to recognize the imperative force of conscience in his own reason, if he would philosophize correctly. But practically few do recognize and obey conscience except those who recognize the authority of the Bible. This book is, in point of fact, the source from which the American people draw their sense of obligation, and of its metes and bounds, so far as they have any. This is especially true of children. Grant the inspiration of the Bible, and we have a basis of moral appeal so simple and strong that practically all other bases are comparatively worthless, especially for the young. Its moral histories have a compatible adaptation to the popular and the juvenile mind. The Bible alone applies to the heart and conscience with any distinct certainty the great forces of future rewards and punishments and the powers of the world to come. And, above all, it alone provides the purifying influences of redemption.

There can be, therefore, no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity. The very power of the teacher in the school-room is either moral or it is a degrading, brute force. But he can show the child no other moral basis for it than the Bible. Hence my argument is as perfect as clear. The teacher must be a Christian. But the American Commonwealth has promised to have no religious character. Then it cannot be teacher. If it undertakes to be, it must be consistent, and go on and unite Church and State. Are you ready to follow your opinions to this consistent end?

Since religious education is so essential a part, it is obvious that a wise Providence must have allotted the right and duty of giving it to some other of the independent spheres between which he has distributed the social interests of man. This duty rests with the parent. Such is the Protestant doctrine the Bible doctrine. Neither State nor Church are to usurp it; but both are to enlighten, encourage and assist the parent in his inalienable task.

A feeble attempt has been made to escape this fatal objection by saying: Let the State schools teach secular knowledge, and let the parents, in other places and times, supplement this with such religious knowledge as they please and by the help of such Church as may please them. The fatal answers are: 1st. The secular teacher depends for the very authority to teach upon the Bible. 2d. The exclusion of the Bible would put a stigma on it in the child’s mind which the parent cannot afterwards remove. 3d. How can one teach history, ethics, psychology , cosmogony , without implying some religious opinions? 4th, and chiefly: The parents who are too poor, ignorant, and delinquent to secure their children secular schooling will, by the stronger reason, be sure to neglect their religious education. But these are the parents whose deficiencies give the sole pretext for the States interference, so that the one-sided training which the State leaves merely secular will remain so in all these cases. But these cases give to the State common school its sole raison d’etre.

I conclude, therefore, that in a country like America, at least, your favorite system is inapplicable, and will work only mischief. Our old Virginia system, besides its economy, has these great logical advantages: that it leaves to parents, without usurpation, their proper function as creators or electors of their children’s schools, and that it thus wholly evades the religious question, which is, to you, insoluble. Government is not the creator but the creature of human society. The Government has no mission from God to make the community; on the contrary, the community should make the Government. What the community shall be is determined by Providence, where it is happily determined by far other causes than the meddling of governments by historical causes in the distant past by vital ideas propagated by great individual minds especially by the Church and its doctrines. The only communities which have had their characters manufactured for them by their government have had a villainously bad character like the Chinese and the Yankees. Noble races make their governments; ignoble ones are made by them.

I remain your very obedient servant,
R. L. DABNEY